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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
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Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
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Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
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Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.
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Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

 

George Santayana

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Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Really? Human nature being what it is, isn't it hopeless to expect that we can do better regardless of whether we remember anything or not? And what if what we remember leads us to false analogies and misunderstandings? I prefer: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility." Or how about this: "Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it."

 

Errol Morris

 

First and foremost, let us remember that change has never been quick. Change has never been simple, or without controversy. Change depends on persistence. Change requires determination.

 

Barack Obama

 

Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.

 

Arthur M. Schlesinger

 

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers.

 

Arthur Schopenhauer

 

"Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them."

 

Henry Steele Commager