George Santayana

Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known as George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American, although he always kept a valid Spanish passport. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the United States. His last will was to be buried in the Spanish Pantheon of the Cimitero Monumentale del Verano in Rome.

Santayana is known for the sayings, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and "nly the dead have seen the end of war." The latter sentence is often (for example, at the start of the film Black Hawk Down) falsely attributed to Plato; the former appears in Reason in Common Sense, the first volume of Santayana's five-volume Life of Reason. (In the 1905 Charles Scribner's Sons edition, it is found on page 284.) Santayana is broadly included among the pragmatists with Harvard University colleagues William James and Josiah Royce. He said that he stood in philosophy "exactly where in daily life."