A Quote by Alfred North Whitehead

The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.

Alfred North Whitehead

Quote Topics

Aims Civilized High Preserved Sense Societies Vigor While Widespread Worth

Quote Author

Alfred North Whitehead
English - Mathematician
February 15, 1861 - December 30, 1947

The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality.

Alfred North Whitehead

Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo.... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grownup babies are expected to hide their eyes.

Clive Bell

Honesty . . . is the foundation upon which relationships and many societies are built. Without it . . . there can be no trust. Widespread lying destroys the fabric of democratic societies, in which the necessary assumption is that people mostly tell the truth.

Janny Scott

The greatest risk to man is not that he aims to high and misses, but that he aims to low and hits.

Michelangelo

Secret Societies have existed among all peoples, savage and civilized, since the beginning of recorded history... It is beyond question that the secret societies of all ages have exercised a considerable degree of political influence.

Manly Hall

Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Institutionalized discrimination is bad for people and for societies. Widespread discrimination is also bad for economies. There is clear evidence that when societies enact laws that prevent productive people from fully participating in the workforce, economies suffer.

Jim Yong Kim

Democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., would have us believe that Big Government funded by extremely high taxes - in countries like France - can create fair and just societies with widespread prosperity, little if any poverty, and a happy and contended population.

Charlie Kirk

In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen.

Theodore Roosevelt

Through poverty, godhunger, the family debacle, I kept a sense of worth. I could limn and paint like no-one else in this human-wounded land: I was worth the while of living. Now my skill is dead. I should be.

Keri Hulme

I believe that free and civilized societies do not hold prisoners incommunicado.

Tom McClintock

For most of history, war has been a more or less functional institution, providing benefits for those societies that were good at it, although the cost in money, in lives, and in suffering was always significant. Only in the past century have large numbers of people begun to question the basic assumption of civilized societies that war is inevitable and often useful.

Gwynne Dyer

War is part of our history, but it is not in at all the same sense part of our prehistory. It is one of the innovations that occurred between nine and eleven thousand years ago when the first civilized societies were coming into being. What has been invented can be changed; war is not in our genes.

Gwynne Dyer

While all societies make their own imaginaries (institutions, laws, traditions, beliefs and behaviors), autonomous societies are those that their members are aware of this fact, and explicitly self-institute (????-?????????). In contrast, the members of heteronomous societies attribute their imaginaries to some extra-social authority (i.e. God, ancestors, historical necessity)