Alfred North Whitehead, OM FRS (1861–1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
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Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ignorance
In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Religion
Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.
—Alfred North Whitehead
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Order, Change, Progress
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Youth
It is the business of the future to be dangerous…. The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Future, Danger, Risk
Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Humanity
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