Top 280 John Dewey Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “If we learn not humility, we learn nothing.”

— John Dewey

104. “The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.”

— John Dewey

105. “No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others.”

— John Dewey

106. “We have advanced far enough to say that democracy is a way of life. We have yet to realize that it is a way of personal life and one which provides a moral standard for personal conduct.”

— John Dewey

107. “The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.”

— John Dewey

108. “Thought is impossible without words.”

— John Dewey

109. “To me faith means not worrying.”

— John Dewey

110. “Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import.”

— John Dewey

111. “If there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization.”

— John Dewey

112. “Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.”

— John Dewey

113. “Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.”

— John Dewey

114. “The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself.”

— John Dewey

115. “Instruction is important.”

— John Dewey

116. “To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo.”

— John Dewey

117. “Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continuous growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.”

— John Dewey

118. “The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.”

— John Dewey

119. “I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.”

— John Dewey

120. “The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.”

— John Dewey

121. “We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social being. Hence, we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and their good.”

— John Dewey

122. “Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and the value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life.”

— John Dewey

123. “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.”

— John Dewey

124. “As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”

— John Dewey

125. “I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.”

— John Dewey

126. “Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.”

— John Dewey

127. “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

128. “Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone’s knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.”

— John Dewey

129. “The difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied.”

— John Dewey

130. “A moral principle is not a command to act or to forbear acting in a given way: it is a tool for analyzing a special situation, the right or wrong being determined by the situation in its entirety, not by the rule as such.”

— John Dewey

131. “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

132. “Any experience, however, trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections.”

— John Dewey

133. “The bad man is the man who no matter how good he has been is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who no matter how morally unworthy he has been is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others.”

— John Dewey

134. “Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate – unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land.”

— John Dewey

135. “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.”

— John Dewey

136. “Talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication.”

— John Dewey

137. “I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.”

— John Dewey

138. “We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.”

— John Dewey

139. “How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen when the teacher is bound?”

— John Dewey

140. “A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in the face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.”

— John Dewey

141. “The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.”

— John Dewey

142. “Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.”

— John Dewey

143. “The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man’s beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life.”

— John Dewey

144. “There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.”

— John Dewey

145. “Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.”

— John Dewey

146. “Intelligence is in constant process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn, and courage in readjustment.”

— John Dewey

147. “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

148. “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

149. “The central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experience that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.”

— John Dewey

150. “Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself.”

— John Dewey