Quote

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

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
Made
Civilization
Horses
Thinking
Number
Require
Numbers
Operations
Moments
Perform
Cavalry
Thought
Fresh
Charges
Without
Limited
Decisive
Must
Horse
Extending
Important
Battle
Advances

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.
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An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
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Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about any things or about some things, without specifications of definite particular things.
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I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.
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You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.
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Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.
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I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
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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. The social machine should run like clockwork.
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The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
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The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
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The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.
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Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
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Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.
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It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
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In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
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The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.
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Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
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It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .
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Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
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