Alfred North Whitehead
"I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologise, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are..."
[The Concept of Nature]
Alfred North Whitehead
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
[An Introduction to Mathematics]
Alfred North Whitehead
"The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change."
[Adventures of Ideas]
Alfred North Whitehead
"Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study."
[The Function of Reason]
Alfred North Whitehead
"So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century."
[The Aims of Education]
Alfred North Whitehead
"The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
[Process and Reality]
Alfred North Whitehead
"The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature."
[Quoted in Price's Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead]
Alfred North Whitehead
"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."
[Dialogues]
