Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Macmillan, 1925, p. 289.
See Heraclitus {436440} for the ancient Greek exposition of this idea.
1st Baron Macaulay. FDR used the latter part of the quotation in a speech to the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, NY, September 29, 1936.
She was charged with interfering with the Draft during WWI. She wrote and gave speeches against the war and was convicted according to the laws and court interpretations of the time.
1st Baron Macaulay. See {620691} for a related idea.
This statement is very revealing in that it illustrates the attitude of the establishment of most developing nations. Traditional change is OK as long as it is not does transformational—ie as long as it does not make any meaningful changes. But modernization requires transformational change; without it there is no major reform and all institutions and power structures remain in their positions.
Alfred North Whitehead OM FRS FBA was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
