condemned
Explanation
The Joke
Two people discuss the famous George Santayana quote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." One agrees enthusiastically, but the other points out that if you actually read the book, the preceding sentence changes the meaning entirely. The full context reveals it is actually a point about "savages" without historical records -- not the universal lesson about learning from history that people typically take from it. This means the quote does not mean what everyone thinks it means. The first person then realizes: "People who do not know the past of that quote are condemned to repeat it incorrectly." The other person remarks that this is ironic. Finally, the first person admits: "I do not want to understand the world. I just want to be right."
The Humor
The comic is a multi-layered joke about intellectual laziness and the irony of misquoting a quote about the dangers of not knowing the past. The Santayana quote is one of the most commonly cited aphorisms in political and historical discourse, but the comic reveals that most people who cite it have never read the source material and are using it out of context. This creates a perfect recursive irony: people who do not know the history of the quote about knowing history are condemned to repeat (misuse) it. The final punchline -- "I do not want to understand the world. I just want to be right" -- is a sharp commentary on how people use quotes and historical references not to genuinely learn, but as rhetorical weapons to win arguments.
References
The quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" comes from George Santayana'''s 1905 work The Life of Reason. In its original context, Santayana was discussing how progress depends on retentiveness -- the ability to retain and build upon past experience. The preceding passage discusses how without historical records, each generation starts from scratch, which he characterized as a form of perpetual infancy among peoples without written history.