All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Advancements in civilization often come with risks that can destabilize society.
Alfred North Whitehead's quote highlights the paradox of progress, suggesting that while advancements may lead to improved conditions, they simultaneously pose significant dangers that can threaten the very fabric of society. This reflects the dual nature of innovation, where the pursuit of knowledge and development can yield both beneficial and destructive consequences as history has shown.
Themes
ProgressDangerCivilizationSocietyInnovation
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech discussing the implications of technological advancements.
More from Alfred North Whitehead
All quotes →The vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
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.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
Similar quotes
The happy medium - truth in all things - is no longer either known or valued; to gain applause, one must write things so inane that they might be played on barrel-organs, or so unintelligible that no rational being can comprehend them, though on that very account, they are likely to please.
Wolfgang Amadeus MozartRead
Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.
Christopher HitchensRead
Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore.
Haruki MurakamiRead
The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.
Arthur RansomeRead
I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read
Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead