Dewey Decimal Quotes

Part of my job is to help other kids find books, because not everyone has a keenly organized mind. Some kids could wander the library for hours and still have no idea how to find anything. For them, the Dewey Decimal System might as well be advanced calculus. ~ Neal Shusterman

Did he orchestrate the reclusive redcap's rise to become a predator in public office? Plant the swarm of brownies on the mayor's lawn? Promote adoption of the Dewey decimal system in libraries across the continent? It's the not knowing I find most irksome." "The Dewey decimal system?" "It's gaining popularity. I don't trust it." "We'll ~ William Ritter

There is a hideous invention called the Dewey Decimal System. And you have to look up your topic in books and newspapers. Pages upon pages upon pages…"

Uncle Will frowned. "Didn't they teach you how to go about research in that school of yours?"

"No. But I can recite 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' while making martinis."

"I weep for the future."

"There's where the martinis come in. ~ Libba Bray

Libraries are at a cultural crossroads. Some proffer that libraries as we know them may go away altogether, ironic victims of the information age where Google has subverted Dewey decimal and researchers can access anything on a handheld device. Who needs to venture deep into the stacks when answers are but a click away? ~ Sam Weller

-You've got a ... Lot of books, he said at last.
-it's a sickness.
-Are you ... Seeing anyone for it?
-I'm afraid it's untreatable.
-is this the ... Dewey decimal system?
-No. But it's based on similar principles. Those are the British novelists. The French are in the kitchen. Homer, Virgil, and the other epics are by the tub.
-I take it the ... Transcendental its do better in the sunlight.
-Exactly.
-Do they need much water?
-Not as much as you think. But lots of pruning.
He pointed the volume toward a pile of books under my bed.
-And the ... Mushrooms?
-The Russians.
-Ah.
-Who's winning?
-Not me. ~ Amor Towles

Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for. ~ Brian Selznick

For the record, do I know anyone not a demon or a freak?" – Nick
"Yes, you do. Not sure if Bubba and Mark go into the latter or not, though. I'm too tired to mentally categorize them. You figure it out, and I'll go with your Dewey decimal." – Caleb ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior - benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.
'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.'
'Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed.
'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course - as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Good," said the First Speaker. "And tell me, what do you think of all this. A finished work of art, is it not?"
"Definitely!"
"Wrong! It is not." This, with sharpness. "It is the first lesson you must unlearn. The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct. Instead, it is merely the best that could be done at the time. Over a dozen generations of men have pored over these equations, worked at them, taken them apart to the last decimal place, and put them together again. They've done more than that. They've watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they've checked reality, and they have learned. ~ Isaac Asimov

The law is bigger than money - but only if the law works hard enough. ~ Thomas Dewey

God giveth true grace to but a chosen few, however many aspire to it. ~ Orville Dewey

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. ~ John Dewey

The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give. ~ John Dewey

Men cannot labor on always. They must have recreation. ~ Orville Dewey

If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. ~ John Dewey

I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing. ~ John Dewey

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

The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. ~ John Dewey

Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large. ~ John Dewey

The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them. ~ John Dewey

If there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization. ~ John Dewey

It may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it. ~ John Dewey

Individuality, conceived as a temporal development involves uncertainty, indeterminacy, or contingency. Individuality is the source of whatever is unpredictable in the world....genuine time, if it exists as anything else except the measure of motions in space, is all one with the existence of individuals as individuals, with the creative, with the occurrence of unpredictable novelties. Everything that can be said contrary to this conclusion is but a reminder that an individual may lose his individuality, for individuals become imprisoned in routine and fall to the level of mechanisms. Genuine time then ceases to be an integral element of their being. Our behavior becomes predictable, because it is but an external rearrangement of what went before....surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual....the artist in realizing his own individuality reveals potentialities hitherto unrealized. The revelation is the inspiration of other individuals to make the potentialities real, for it is not sheer revolt against things as they are which stirs human endeavor to its depth, but vision of what might be and is not. Subordination of the artists to any special cause no matter how worthy does vi ~ John Dewey

Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual re-approximation to conditions of life. ~ John Dewey

Whenever I see a forecast written out to two decimal places, I cannot help but wonder if there is a misunderstanding of the limitations of the data, and an illusion of precision. ~ Barry Ritholtz

Oh, the sweet, painful pleasure of anticipation! ~ Genevieve Dewey

Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act. ~ John Dewey

We do not learn from experience ... we learn from reflecting on experience. ~ John Dewey

To me faith means not worrying ~ John Dewey

You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. ~ John Dewey

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

it is of the highest concernment that care should be taken of its conduct is a moderate statement. While the power of thought frees us from servile subjection to instinct, appetite, and routine, it also brings with it the occasion and possibility of error and mistake. In elevating us above the brute, it opens to us the possibility of failures to which the animal, limited to instinct, cannot sink. ~ John Dewey

Strait-jacket and chain-gang procedures had to be done away with if there was to a chance for growth of individuals in the intellectual springs of freedom without which there is no assurance of genuine and continued normal growth. ~ John Dewey

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis. ~ John Dewey

In the philosophy of mind - as, indeed, in more important matters - [the twentieth century] has been a less than fully satisfactory century. We pretty much wasted the first half, so it seems to me, in a neurotic and obsessive preoccupation with refuting Cartesian skepticism about other minds. In the event, it didn't matter that the skeptics weren't refuted since there turned out not to be any. The only philosophers who really were doubtful about the existence of other minds were relentless anti-Cartesians like Wittgenstein, Dewey, Ryle, Quine and Rorty, and they were equally doubtful about the existence of their own. What we got for our efforts was mostly decades of behaviorism and the persistent bad habit of trying to run epistemological or semantic arguments for metaphysical conclusions. The end of this, I fear, is still not with us. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

In England, philosophers are honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they are buried with the kings ... In France warrants are issued against them, they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters: Do we see that England is any the worse for it? ~ John Dewey

The struggle for democracy has to be maintained on as many fronts as culture has aspects: political, economic, international, educational, scientific and artistic, religious. ~ John Dewey

Mary girl, life is as simple as we let it be. ~ Genevieve Dewey

No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others. ~ John Dewey

It wasn't his job to keep tabs on mob princesses, but this one was sort of a hobby. ~ Genevieve Dewey

It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say "that is red" instead of "that reddens," either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red. ~ John Dewey

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

Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business. ~ John Dewey

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

a problem well put is half solved. ~ John Dewey