John Dewey Quotes

The best preparation for the future is a well-spent today.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.

Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.

There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.

If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows up.

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.

Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material.

A response is not just a re-action, a protest, as it were, against being disturbed; it is, as the word indicates, an answer. It meets the stimulus, and corresponds with it.

Some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.

Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.

Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process.

A man can be prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his disposition to commit burglary.

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.

Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.

When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result.

The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.

The school must be "a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons".

The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals.

One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.

Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them.

Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself

There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.

Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education.‎

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either/Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities.

Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.

Such words as "society" and "community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.

Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required.

All genuine learning comes through experience.

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.

It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.

All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.

I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.

Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.

Expertness of taste is at once the result and reward of constant exercise of thinking.

Balance is balancing.

...the moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life.

Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.

What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life.

The future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind.

A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others.

We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.

The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself

As a child lives today, he will live tomorrow.

Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import.