Top 280 John Dewey Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.”

— John Dewey

52. “We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.”

— John Dewey

53. “If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.”

— John Dewey

54. “Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.”

— John Dewey

55. “Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.”

— John Dewey

56. “Education is life itself.”

— John Dewey

57. “Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them.”

— John Dewey

58. “Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.”

— John Dewey

59. “Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society.”

— John Dewey

60. “Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations.”

— John Dewey

61. “I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.”

— John Dewey

62. “As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.”

— John Dewey

63. “A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young.”

— John Dewey

64. “Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process.”

— John Dewey

65. “Confidence is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.”

— John Dewey

66. “The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities.”

— John Dewey

67. “Hunger not to have, but to be.”

— John Dewey

68. “Science is a systematic means of gaining reliable knowledge.”

— John Dewey

69. “As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.”

— John Dewey

70. “Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.”

— John Dewey

71. “Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done.”

— John Dewey

72. “Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative.”

— John Dewey

73. “Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed.”

— John Dewey

74. “The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.”

— John Dewey

75. “Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning?”

— John Dewey

76. “Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.”

— John Dewey

77. “Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys.”

— John Dewey

78. “Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner.”

— John Dewey

79. “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.”

— John Dewey

80. “No man’s credit is as good as his money.”

— John Dewey

81. “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

82. “Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.”

— John Dewey

83. “To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.”

— John Dewey

84. “Mind is a verb not a noun.”

— John Dewey

85. “The best preparation for the future is a well-spent today.”

— John Dewey

86. “Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire.”

— John Dewey

87. “To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions – that is art.”

— John Dewey

88. “Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.”

— John Dewey

89. “Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life.”

— John Dewey

90. “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”

— John Dewey

91. “The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.”

— John Dewey

92. “As a child lives today, he will live tomorrow.”

— John Dewey

93. “Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.”

— John Dewey

94. “Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order.”

— John Dewey

95. “Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

— John Dewey

96. “Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.”

— John Dewey

97. “The conduct of schools, based upon a new order of conception, is so much more difficult than is the management of schools which walk the beaten path.”

— John Dewey

98. “Schools have ignored the value of experience and chosen to teach by pouring in.”

— John Dewey

99. “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

100. “Change as change is mere flux and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes.”

— John Dewey