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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Century
Printing
Information
Justification
Since
Mathematical
Existence
Math
University
Mathematics
Mere
Imparting
Concerned
Fifteenth
More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.
Alfred North Whitehead
The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.
Alfred North Whitehead
The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.
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The motive of success is not enough.
Alfred North Whitehead
The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
Alfred North Whitehead
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
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Error itself may be happy chance.
Alfred North Whitehead
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
Alfred North Whitehead
Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.
Alfred North Whitehead
A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.
Alfred North Whitehead
No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead
No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.
Alfred North Whitehead
In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.
Alfred North Whitehead
Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.
Alfred North Whitehead
The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.
Alfred North Whitehead
Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.
Alfred North Whitehead
Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural...A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.
Alfred North Whitehead
Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.
Alfred North Whitehead
Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
Alfred North Whitehead
