The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

— 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

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past and it is the future.

— Alfred North Whitehead

There are no whole truths. All truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The "silly" question is the first intimation of some totally new development

— Alfred North Whitehead

The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children--Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together

— Alfred North Whitehead

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

— Alfred North Whitehead