Top 100 Dewey Quotes
#1. The first election I remember was Dewey Truman in '48. I was, I guess, seven years old.
George Will
#2. Who was the founder of American education? John Dewey - you know that very well - card-carrying Communist. The American education system, in America - one of the so-called 'founders' was a Communist
Rafael Cruz
#3. 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
#4. I like to think of myself as an original. I have my own sound. That's not easy to come by, I worked on it for many years. But I like to think that I sound like Dewey Redman
Dewey Redman
#5. Librarying is a harder profession than the public realizes, he said. People think it's all rubber stamps, knowing that Dewey 521 is celestial mechanics and saying 'Try looking under fiction' sixty eight times a day.
Jasper Fforde
#6. 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
#7. Always make the other person feel important. John Dewey, as we have already noted, said that the desire to be important is the deepest urge in human nature; and William James said: The
Dale Carnegie
#8. John Dewey reminded us that the value of what students do 'resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes.
Alfie Kohn
#9. 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
#10. The time is when a library is a school, and the librarian is the highest sense a teacher. - Melvil Dewey, 1876
John Palfrey
#11. Dewey didn't create it. Nathan did. Mr. Green repurposed
Kevin Lee Swaim
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. If the president of the college had asked me what I thought about Dewey McLean, I'd say he's a weak sister. I thought he'd been knocked out of the ball game and had just disappeared, because nobody invites him to conferences anymore.
Luis Walter Alvarez
#16. To Dewey, if brevity was the soul of wit, stagecraft was the very center of politics.
David Pietrusza
#17. Dewey was obsessed with efficiency. He even changed his name from "Melville" to "Melvil" as a time-saving gesture and briefly even changed his last name to "Dui.
Alex Wright
#18. The listening part is afraid that there may not be time to say it. Dewey Dell - As I Lay Dying.
William Faulkner
#19. It's Cash and Jewel and Varadaman and Dewey Del', pa says kind of hangdog and proud too, with this teeth and all, even if he wouldn't look at us. 'Meet Mrs Bundren', he says.
William Faulkner
#20. I was falling hard for Laura. I was not much of a cat person, but I knew our relationship was solid when I bonded with her black-and-white shorthair, Dewey, named for the decimal system.
George W. Bush
#21. Dewey sent him, I thought, when I saw those eyes.
Vicki Myron
#22. But the player librarians all over the country were raving about most was Marjory Muldauer from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. A gangly seventh grader, a foot taller than any of her competitors, Marjory Muldauer had memorized the ten categories of the Dewey decimal system before she entered preschool.
Chris Grabenstein
#23. The 'DuckTales' ensemble is clearly critical. There's the core set of characters - Scrooge, Webby, Launchpad, Huey, Dewey and Louie ... Plus there's Gyro and Duckworth and Mrs. Beakley and so on. The cast is huge.
Warren Spector
#24. The Dewey decimal system really works. So that's all I needed to know. Elementary school taught me that.
Michelle Rodriguez
#25. The green earth sends her incense up. From many a mountain shrine; From folded leaf and dewey cup She pours her sacred wine.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#26. I had a great education. From kindergarten to John Dewey High School in Coney Island, I am public-school educated.
Spike Lee
#27. Dewey repudiated what he called militant atheism. He felt that people have innate religious qualities, such as compassion for sufferers, an urge to improve life, and a sense of awe before the mysteries of existence. However, by the standards of conventional religion, Dewey was an atheist.
James A. Haught
#28. Like Dewey, I was lucky. I got to leave on my own terms. Find your place. Be happy with what you have. Treat everyone well. Live a good life. It isn't about material things; it's about love. And you can never anticipate love.
Vicki Myron
#29. Dewey believed that education has a practical function and should not be seen as a series of pointless hurdles to jump over before 'real life' begins. Education isn't a preamble to life; it's part of life, and it exists to solve practical human problems and meet human needs.
Gregory Bassham
#30. John Dewey was right that "failure is instructive," then Tolstoy's life is, well, an instructional gold mine.
Leo Tolstoy
#31. Do you really think I should be out there with Officer Dewey? I mean, you saw Scream. The guy can't protect anybody. Everybody in that movie died!
Alex Riley
#32. You really have to get to know Dewey to dislike him.
Robert Taft
#33. (about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the Arts and Lit non-fiction section)
I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.
Nick Hornby
#34. I mean sleeping with you was plan B. Dewey jumped the gun on that one, though I can't say as I blame him. If I were in his shoes, I'm not sure I would have even bothered with plan A." (Wendell)
Marshall Thornton
#35. Though my love for you is infinitesimal, your eyes are as dewey as any old decimal.
Elizabeth McCracken
#36. He wished he was with his mom in her library, where everything was safe and numbered and organized by the Dewey decimal system. Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for, like the meaning of your dream, or your dad.
Brian Selznick
#37. Booker T. Washington, Buddha, John Dewey, Leo Buscaglia, Moses and Jesus.
Jack Canfield
#38. Truman makes friends without influencing people,' noted Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 'Dewey influences people without making friends.
David Pietrusza
#39. 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.
John Dewey
#40. Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.
John Dewey
#41. I want to be with you, Demetria. Go on dates, have sex and pointless arguments, figure out why you like to eat rabbit food, be the person you call first when you've had a bad day, come over and hold your hair when you're sick. How much clearer can I make this?
Genevieve Dewey
#42. Teaching can be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless someone buys ... yet there are teachers who think they have done a good day's teaching irrespective of what the pupils have learned.
John Dewey
#43. Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them.
John Dewey
#44. You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.
John Dewey
#45. Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.
John Dewey
#46. We do not learn from experience ... we learn from reflecting on experience.
John Dewey
#47. Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume
an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.
John Dewey
#48. 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
#49. A library after closing is a lonely place. It is heart-poundingly silent, and the rows of shelves create an almost unfathomable number of dark and creepy corners.
Vicki Myron
#50. As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.
John Dewey
#51. Yes, life was made up of these instances in time. Big moments hidden inside little decisions.
Genevieve Dewey
#52. I believe that the school must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground.
John Dewey
#53. Since there is no single set of abilities running throughout human nature, there is no single curriculum which all should undergo. Rather, the schools should teach everything that anyone is interested in learning.
John Dewey
#54. 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
#55. We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.
John Dewey
#56. The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
John Dewey
#57. To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive.
John Dewey
#58. The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
John Dewey
#59. 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
#60. I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.
John Dewey
#61. If you're not in New York, you're camping out.
Thomas Dewey
#62. A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability.
John Dewey
#63. Kyle, you are a mellow dude ... You can't be with an agitator. And that's what she is. An agitator. She's a Jackson Pollock and you're a Thomas Kinkade.
Genevieve Dewey
#64. The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.
John Dewey
#65. 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
#66. All genuine education comes about through experience.
John Dewey
#67. Women were tricky creatures under the best of circumstances. This was not the best of circumstances.
Genevieve Dewey
#68. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
John Dewey
#69. Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order
John Dewey
#70. In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.
John Dewey
#71. 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
#73. Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy.
John Dewey
#74. The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
John Dewey
#75. The music should be first, not the ego or the personality or the style.
Dewey Redman
#76. 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
#77. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
John Dewey
#78. It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.
John Dewey
#79. I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
John Dewey
#80. Now in many cases - too many cases - the activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being.
John Dewey
#81. Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey
#82. 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
#84. By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.
John Dewey
#85. The two limits of every unit of thinking are a perplexed, troubled, or confused situation at the beginning, and a cleared up, unified, resolved situation at the close.
John Dewey
#86. Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.
John Dewey
#87. Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself
John Dewey
#88. The demand for liberty is a demand for power, either for possession of powers of action not already possessed or for retention and expansion of powers already possessed.
John Dewey
#89. Just because the bully was always nice to you, never stole your lunch money, didn't make him any less of a bully, did it?
Genevieve Dewey
#90. Giving and taking of orders modifies actions and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.
John Dewey
#92. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society.
John Dewey
#93. Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
John Dewey
#94. Education has no more serious responsibility than the making of adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure not only for the sake of immediate health, but for the sake of its lasting effect upon the habits of the mind.
John Dewey
#95. The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.
John Dewey
#96. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.
John Dewey
#97. We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.
John Dewey
#98. Traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.
John Dewey
#99. Thought is impossible without words.
John Dewey
#100. 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
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