The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half
of the time.
‘New Yorker’ 3 July 1944
11.65 T. H. White 1906-64
The Victorians had not been anxious to go away for the weekend. The Edwardians, on the
contrary, were nomadic.
‘Farewell Victoria’ (1933) pt. 4
The once and future king.
Title of novel (1958), translating Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d’Arthur bk. 21, ch. 7 ‘Hic iacet Arthurus, rex
quondam rexque futurus’
11.66 Alfred North Whitehead 1861-1947
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
‘Adventures of Ideas’ (1933) pt. 1, ch. 5
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is
almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its
interest, and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a
false one.
‘Adventures of Ideas’ (1933) pt. 4, ch. 16
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths
that plays the devil.
‘Dialogues’ (1954) prologue
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely
on the thing apprehended.
‘Dialogues’ (1954) 15 December 1939
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to
like, and immorality is what they dislike.
‘Dialogues’ (1954) 30 August 1941
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of
the pattern.
‘Dialogues’ (1954) 10 June 1943
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform
without thinking about them.
‘Introduction to Mathematics’ (1911) ch. 5
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of
a series of footnotes to Plato.
‘Process and Reality’ (1929) pt. 2, ch. 1
11.67 Bertrand Whitehead