Quotation

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
Alfred North Whitehead
Quoted in Advancing Knowledge and the Knowledge Economy
Edited by Brian Kahin and Dominique Foray

Comment: I am not sure what Whitehead meant, but I suppose this is idea underlies a representative form of government. If our representatives are doing their job, we don't need to think nearly as much about what we as a people are doing. It is easier to evaluate whether they are doing a decent job than to figure out how to do that which they should do. JAD