We Are Always Condemned to Repeat History

Heidi S.
6 min readMar 6, 2024
Photo by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash

I regularly, and especially lately, hear people say “if we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it,” or popular variations of it, like being on the “right side” of history. This idea may come from George Santayana, who wrote in The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

--

--

Heidi S.

PhD in philosophy | Feminist | Anarchist | Pop culture junkie | Kpop listener | Actually Autistic