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George Santayana

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Egotism is a bastard word meant to designate something spurious and artificial, not to be confused with the natural egoism or self-​assertion proper to every living creature. To condemn the latter would be to condemn life, which could not go on without it; but like every normal faculty, self-​assertion has degrees, and passes insensibly from the happy mean to the opposite vices of excess and defect. Egotism, on the contrary, though more or less pronounced, is always a vice because it is founded on a mistake.


George Santayana, postscript to Egotism in German Philosophy (1916).

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