Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

Ideas wont keep: something must be done about them.

Not ignorance but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesnt depend on formal schooling. Think of those Galilean peasants.

Life is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.

It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

We think in generalities but we live in detail.

The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.

The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past and it is the future.

There are no whole truths. All truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

Routine is the god of every social system it is the seventh heaven of business the essential component in the success of every factory the ideal of every statesman.

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.