Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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

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

Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.

Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake.

A man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning.

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.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.

The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to feel important.

Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not 'in' that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil.

Modern philosophy certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated

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

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.

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.

Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.

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

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.

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.