Top 100 Dewey Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them.
John Dewey
#6. You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow.
John Dewey
#7. Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.
John Dewey
#8. We do not learn from experience ... we learn from reflecting on experience.
John Dewey
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.
John Dewey
#13. Yes, life was made up of these instances in time. Big moments hidden inside little decisions.
Genevieve Dewey
#14. 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
#15. The first election I remember was Dewey Truman in '48. I was, I guess, seven years old.
George Will
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.
John Dewey
#19. The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
John Dewey
#20. 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
#21. The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
John Dewey
#22. 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
#23. I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.
John Dewey
#24. If you're not in New York, you're camping out.
Thomas Dewey
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.
John Dewey
#28. 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
#29. All genuine education comes about through experience.
John Dewey
#30. Women were tricky creatures under the best of circumstances. This was not the best of circumstances.
Genevieve Dewey
#31. 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
#32. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
John Dewey
#33. Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order
John Dewey
#34. In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available to other experiences.
John Dewey
#35. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
John Dewey
#40. The music should be first, not the ego or the personality or the style.
Dewey Redman
#41. 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
#42. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
John Dewey
#43. It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.
John Dewey
#44. 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
#45. I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
John Dewey
#46. 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
#47. Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.
John Dewey
#56. Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself
John Dewey
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society.
John Dewey
#63. Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
John Dewey
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.
John Dewey
#67. We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.
John Dewey
#68. Traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dying.
John Dewey
#69. Thought is impossible without words.
John Dewey
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Science is a systematic means of gaining reliable knowledge.
John Dewey
#73. Labor is man's greatest function. He is nothing, he can do nothing, he can achieve nothing, he can fulfill nothing, without working.
Orville Dewey
#74. The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities
John Dewey
#75. 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
#76. The real purveyors of the news are artists, for artists are the ones who infuse fact with perception, emotion, and appreciation ... We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason.
John Dewey
#77. Things that are bad for business are bad for the people who work for business.
Thomas E. Dewey
#78. A single course of studies for all progressive schools is out of the question; it would mean abandoning the fundamental principle of connection with life-experiences.
John Dewey
#79. Our hearts must not only be broken with sorrow, but be broken from sin, to constitute repentance.
Orville Dewey
#80. The premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home.
John Dewey
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. If humanity has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect - its effect upon conscious experience - we may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young.
John Dewey
#84. It is difficult to connect general principles with such thoroughly concrete things as children.
John Dewey
#85. The intimation never wholly deserts us that there is, in the unformed activities of childhood and youth, the possibilities of a better life for the community as well as for individuals here and there. This dim sense is the ground of our abiding idealization of childhood.
John Dewey
#86. She smelled like vanilla spice, or pumpkin pie, or something sweet yet sinful.
Genevieve Dewey
#87. To my thinking, a great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand, and, above all, a great heart. And when I look into the future, I am inclined to think that most of the men who achieve this greatness will be women.
Melvil Dewey
#88. Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.
John Dewey
#89. To "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.
John Dewey
#90. All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.
John Dewey
#91. Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject matter.
John Dewey
#92. Within even the most social group there are many relations that are not as yet social.
John Dewey
#93. The time is when a library is a school, and the librarian is the highest sense a teacher. - Melvil Dewey, 1876
John Palfrey
#94. The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.
John Dewey
#95. 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
#96. The moment philosophy supposes it can find a final and comprehensive solution, it ceases to be inquiry and becomes either apologetics or propaganda.
John Dewey
#97. No man should be in public office who can't make more money in private life.
Thomas Dewey
#98. An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him.
John Dewey
#99. Every conversation they had anymore it felt like instead of unraveling the mystery, it just further entangled all of them into a twisted never-ending knot.
Genevieve Dewey
#100. Dewey didn't create it. Nathan did. Mr. Green repurposed
Kevin Lee Swaim
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