John Dewey

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.