“It must have required enormous effort for man to overcome his natural tendency to live like the animals in a continual present.”

Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day (1988), p.22

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Gerald James Whitrow39

British mathematician 1912–2000

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“It is unwise to make education too cheap. If everything is provided freely, there is a tendency to put no value on anything. Education must always have a certain price on it; even as the very process of learning itself must always require individual effort and initiative.”

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Context: To attempt to penetrate through the indeterminate confusion of present tendencies and first efforts in order to foresee the exact forms the new creation will take, would be an effort of very doubtful utility. One might as well try to forecast a harmony from the sounds made by the tuning of the instrument. In one direction or another we may just detect certain decisive indications, but even these are only first indications and we may be quite sure that much lies behind them that will go far beyond anything that they yet suggest. This is true whether in religion and spirituality or thought and science, poetry and art or society and politics. Everywhere there is, at most, only a beginning of beginnings.

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“It must have required enormous effort for man to overcome his natural tendency to live like the animals in a continual present.”

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Gerald James Whitrow39

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