Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.

Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it .... For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.

Education is the foundation upon which we build our future.

Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

Few things are as essential as education.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned.

If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.

But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

Inductive reason, which alone makes man master of his environment, is an achievement; and when once born it must be reinforced by inhibiting the growth of other modes of knowledge.

It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance, for it requires knowledge to perceive it; and, therefore, he that can perceive it hath it not.

How well he's read, to reason against reading!

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years, our security can rest only on our ability to learn.

Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.