John Dewey (1859-1952)

Quotes

• We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

• Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.

• The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

• We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

• It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need.

• Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.

• Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

• 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.

• Education is life itself.

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

• Reason is experimental intelligence, conceived after the pattern of science, and used in the creation of social arts; it has something to do. It liberates man from the bondage of the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into custom. It projects a better future and assists man in its realization.

• Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.