Dewey Quotes

Just one word, infused with naked desperation; half prayer, half enchantment. It felt like a freezing charm on her soul making her his prisoner, yet setting her free all at once. ~ Genevieve Dewey

The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life. ~ John Dewey

I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Time with his old flail Beat me full sore; Till: Hold, I cried, I'll stand no more. Then I heard a wail And looking spied How love's little bow Had laid time low. ~ John 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

If you're not in New York, you're camping out. ~ Thomas Dewey

Cause and effect is infallible, like the shadow that follows one's body wherever it goes. ~ Chokling Dewey Dorje

The only thing that is unqualifiedly given is the total pervasive quality; and the objection to calling it "given" is that the word suggests something to which it is given, mind or thought or consciousness or whatever, as well possibly as something that gives. ~ John Dewey

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry. ~ John Dewey

Three has always been tougher than Two. Think of any of your famous threesomes. The Three Stooges? Look at the anger there. My bet is that before Curly was born, Moe and Larry could play together for hours without even a single poke in the eye. Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Donald Duck never had a moment's peace. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? I rest my case. ~ Paul Reiser

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

In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity, to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educates others into slaves. ~ John Dewey

Dynamic equivalence is a central concept in the translation theory, developed by Eugene A. Nida, which has been widely adopted by the United Bible Societies...Purporting to be an academically linguistic concept, it is in fact a sociocultural concept of communication. Its definition is essentially behavourist: determined by external forces, such as society--with strong pragmatist overtones--focusing on the reader rather than the writer. [M]ost twentieth-century American philosophical endeavours are predominantly pragmatist, dwelling in the shadows cast by William James and John Dewey. ~ J. Cammenga

The crowd wants a hero,not just someone cutting up meat ~ Dewey Gram

Truman charged that Republicans were "Wall Street reactionaries," "gluttons of privilege," "bloodsuckers," and "plunderers." GOP legislators in the 80th Congress, he said, were "tools of the most reactionary elements" who would "skim the cream from our natural resources to satisfy their own greed." Dismissing Dewey, "whose name rhymes with hooey," Truman said, "If you send another Republican Congress to Washington, you're a bigger bunch of suckers than I think you are." "Give 'em hell, Harry!" the people shouted back. "Pour it on!"59 ~ James T. Patterson

If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist. ~ John Dewey

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

Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process. ~ John Dewey

The love of truth is the stimulus to all noble conversation. This is the root of all the charities. The tree which springs from it may have a thousand branches, but they will all bear a golden and generous fruitage. ~ Orville Dewey

There is nothing to do with men [and women] but to love them; to contemplate their virtues with admiration, their faults with pity and forbearance, and their injuries with forgiveness. ~ Orville Dewey

The acquisition of skills is not an end in itself. They are things to be put to use, and that use is their contribution to a common and shared life ~ 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

The intellectual content of religions has always finally adapted itself to scientific and social conditions after they have become clear ... For this reason I do not think that those who are concerned about the future of a religious attitude should trouble themselves about the conflict of science with traditional doctrines. ~ John Dewey

Dr. Beall gave him the first shot, followed closely by the second.
He said, "I'll check for a heartbeat."
I said, "You don't need to. I can see it in his eyes."
Dewey was gone. ~ Vicki Myron

Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life. ~ John Dewey

His face burst into a prism of colors and light as her eyes welled with tears and when they fell down her cheeks it felt like fire. ~ Genevieve Dewey

Let us say, in a word, that the correlation between the laws of mathematics and of physics is the evidence of the rational character of nature. Nature may be reduced to motions; and motions can be understood only as force, activity. But the laws which connect motions are fundamentally mathematical laws,- laws of reason. Hence force, activity, can be understood only as rational, as spiritual. Nature is thus seen to mean Activity, and Activity is seen to mean Intelligence ~ John Dewey

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

What made such a plan seem workable was that for the early pluralists and their multicultural descendants society would have fewer and fewer traditional groups. The kind of pluralist society that Dewey and Kallen envisaged would go beyond rooted ethnic communities. It would become the evolving creation of "free" individual participants, setting goals under scientific direction and having their material interests monitored by a "conductor state." The world as conceived by pluralists was there to be managed and to be made culturally safe for its framers: Eastern and Central European Jews fearful of traditional Gentile mores and the uprooted descendants of New England Calvinists looking for the New Jerusalem under scientific management. ~ Paul Edward Gottfried

Sorrow and profound fatigue are at the heart of Dewey's silence. It had been his ambition to learn "exactly what happened in that house that night." Twice now he'd been told, and the two versions were very much alike, the only serious discrepancy being that Hickock attributed all four deaths to Smith, while Smith contended that Hickock had killed the two women. But the confessions, though they answered
questions of how and why, failed to satisfy his sense of meaningful design. The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered. And Dewey could not forget their sufferings. Nonetheless, he found it possible to look at the man beside him without anger - with, rather, a measure of sympathy - for Perry Smith's life had been no bed of roses but pitiful, an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another. Dewey's sympathy, however, was not deep enough to accommodate either forgiveness or mercy. He hoped to see Perry and his partner hanged - hanged back to back. ~ Truman Capote

Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom. ~ John Dewey

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

What's in a question, you ask? Everything. It is evoking stimulating response or stultifying inquiry. It is, in essence, the very core of teaching. ~ John Dewey

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. ~ John Dewey

A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn. ~ John Dewey

For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an 'ism becomes so involved in reaction against other 'isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities. ~ John Dewey

Teachers are the agents through which knowledge and skills are communicated and rules of conduct enforced. ~ John Dewey

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

There can be no doubt ... of our dependence upon forces beyond our control. Primitive man was so impotent in the face of these forces that g , especially in an unfavorable natural environment, fear became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fear created gods. ~ 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

While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. ~ John Dewey

The great waste comes from [the child's] inability to utilize the experience he gets outside of school in any complete and free way within the school itself while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school - its isolation from life. ~ John Dewey

Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not. ~ John Dewey

Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues. ~ John Dewey

The result of the educative process is capacity for further education. ~ John Dewey

The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking. ~ John Dewey

Insecurity cuts deeper and extends more widely than bare unemployment. Fear of loss of work, dread of the oncoming of old age, create anxiety and eat into self-respect in a way that impairs personal dignity. ~ John Dewey

Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in. ~ John Dewey

To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work. It can be accomplished only piecemeal, a step at a time. ~ John Dewey

We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for. ~ John Dewey

Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature ... This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life. ~ 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

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. ~ John Dewey

We have the illusion of choice because no matter what we choose, the game never changes. The wheels always keep moving in the direction that suits the ones who are designing the wheels. If they don't want that wheel to travel somewhere, they make damn sure it's designed to that it doesn't roll there. ~ Laurel Dewey

When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science? When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed. ~ 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

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

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

Any experience, however, trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections. ~ John Dewey

When a school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guaranty of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious ~ John Dewey

The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself ~ John Dewey

[Dewey's 'Reflex Arc' paper] is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We think we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing. ~ Louis Menand

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

... the people I work for invented the darkness. ~ Laurel Dewey

What makes us moral beings is that ... there are some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit ... But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one's choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice. ~ Richard M. Rorty

Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling. ~ John Dewey

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. ~ John Dewey

Dirt washes off more easily than blood ~ Dewey Gram

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

As an individual passes from one situation to another, his [sic] world, his environment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of one and the same world. What he has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow. The process goes on as long as life and learning continue. Otherwise the course of experience is disorderly, since the individual factor that enters into making an experience is split. A divided world, a world whose parts and aspects do not hang together, is at once a sign and a cause of a divided personality. When the splitting-up reaches a certain point we call the person insane. A fully integrated personality, on the other hand, exists only when successive experiences are integrated with one another. It can be built up only as a world of related objects is constructed. ~ John Dewey

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

We need not be afraid of the future, for the future will be in our own hands. ~ Thomas Dewey

The conception that growth and progress are just approximations to a final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life. ~ John Dewey

Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done. ~ John Dewey

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

A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder. ~ John Dewey

...that is how the liars remain in control. Through one's silence and fear of alienation, the truth is buried deeper under the soil of fabrication and deceit. Chaos rules because eventually, it's easier to cling to whatever debris is left than to walk into the storm, taste the rain and greet the thunder with your fists balled and your courage lit like a fire that will never be put out. ~ Laurel Dewey

There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes. ~ John Dewey

We have already noticed the difference in the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The former is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as another, since each is just something to look at. The latter is bound up with what is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him. ~ John Dewey

Every presidential nominee says his vice president will be given a serious, important role in his new administration. But it almost never materializes. A strong, totally self-centered politician like Tom Dewey sharing his hard-won power with a vice president? Don't count on it.' - David Brinkley ~ David Pietrusza

Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts. ~ John Dewey

Until one morning, one of the coldest mornings of the year, when I came in with the book cart and found Jean Hollis Clark, a fellow librarian, standing dead still in the middle of the staff room.
"I heard a noise from the drop box," Jean said.
"What kind of noise?"
"I think it's an animal."
"A what?"
"An animal," Jean said. "I think there's an animal in the drop box."
That was when I heard it, a low rumble from under the metal cover. It didn't sound like an animal. It sounded like an old man clearing his throat.
Gurr-gug-gug. Gurr-gug-gug.
But the opening at the top of the chute was only a few inches wide, so that would be quite a squeeze for an old man. It had to be an animal. But what kind? I got down on my knees, reached over the lid, and hoped for a chipmunk.
What I got instead was a blast of freezing air. The night before, the temperature had reached minus fifteen degrees, and that didn't take into account the wind, which cut under your coat and squeezed your bones. And on that night, of all nights, someone had jammed a book into return slot, wedging it open. It was as cold in the box as it was outside, maybe colder, since the box was lined with metal. It was the kind of cold that made it almost painful to breathe.
I was still catching my breath, in fact, when I saw the kitten huddled in the front left corner of the box. It was tucked up in a little space underneath a book, so all I could see at first was its head. It loo ~ Vicki Myron

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

You really have to get to know Dewey to dislike him. ~ Robert Taft

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better. ~ John Dewey

Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner. ~ John Dewey

As trite as the thought was, even her butterflies got the butterflies with just a tilt of his lips, and it had always been so. ~ Genevieve Dewey

To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing. In a certain sense, the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question. "Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place." Further, there is no way of guaranteeing that an intellectual class will be discreet and restrained in the use of its influence; the only assurance that can be given to any community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the power of intellect than if it permits them. To be sure, intellectuals, contrary to the fantasies of cultural vigilantes, are hardly ever subversive of a society as a whole. But intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule. ~ Richard Hofstadter

Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole. ~ John Dewey

Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling. ~ John Dewey

Every art communicates because it expresses. It enables us to share vividly and deeply in meanings ... For communication is not announcing things ... Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular ... the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen. ~ John Dewey

Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction. ~ John Dewey

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. ~ John Dewey

To be born, to live and to die is merely to change forms ... And what does one form matter any more than another? ... Each form has its own sort of happiness and unhappiness. From the elephant down to the flea ... from the flea down to the sensitive and living molecule which is the origin of all, there is not a speck in the whole of nature that does not feel pain or pleasure. ~ John Dewey

Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked. ~ John Dewey

The Professor took the old practices and studied them, worked out their mechanical principles and then devised a graded scientific set of tricks, but is based on the elementary laws of mechanics, a study of the equilibrium of the human body, the ways in which it is disturbed, how to recover your own and take advantage of the shifting of the center of gravity of the other person. The first thing that is taught is how to fall down without being hurt, that alone is worth the price of admission and ought to be taught in all our gyms. ~ John Dewey

For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention. ~ John Dewey

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. ~ John Dewey

The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement ~ John Dewey

Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper. ~ Gerald Early