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The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.

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
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Way
Fishes
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Cardinals
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More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.
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The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.
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Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.
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Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.
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The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.
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Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.
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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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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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Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
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It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
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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.
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The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
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Education with inert ideas is not only useless it is above all things harmful.
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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 physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .
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The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.
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Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.
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A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.
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Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.
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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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