Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About Progress
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Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
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Error is the price we pay for progress.
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The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
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There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.
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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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Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
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Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.
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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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Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
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Alfred North Whitehead
- Born: February 15, 1861
- Died: December 30, 1947
- Occupation: Mathematician