This statement is a favourite of psudeo-intellectuals everywhere, usually repeated when some mild politician does something completely expected, or by history students trying to justify their financially unwise degree.
Being a student of history means knowing the liberal humanism is always right
First of all this isn't actually a real quote from George Santayana, the real quote is:
"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."
A quite different meaning here, History® is not mentioned at all but instead "the past" is referred to in terms of actual retained experience and not historical narratives.
The origin of this exact quote is actually famous peace advocate Winston Churchill
Maybe you should have learned communist dictators aren't the most trustworthy people
Buy anyway, here's why the quote makes no sense, think about what is being claimed:
1. We observe that history repeats itself
2. This was because people did not learn from history
3. If we learn history then history will not repeat itself
4. The history we learn is that history repeats itself
5. History repeats itself because people do not learn from history
This is essentially a paradox, if the 1st premise is true then we learn from history that we do not learn from history and therefore learning from history would not prevent us from repeating history because we learn that we cannot learn from history.
Don't try to unravel this knot of a paradox, cut it