No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Not ignorance but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....

— Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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.

— Alfred North Whitehead