Great Throughts Treasury

"There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced."

"We will not have peace by afterthought."

"Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?"

"What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth."

"Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going."

"Why are people more appalled at what they term an unnatural form of dying than by an unnatural form of living?"