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Democracy Quotes by John Dewey

22 Democracy quotes by John Dewey

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

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Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.

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Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

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

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

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Talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of…

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The struggle for democracy has to be maintained on as many fronts as culture has aspects: political, economic, international, educational, scientific and…

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We have advanced far enough to say that democracy is a way of life. We have yet to realize that it is…

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The method of democracy is to bring conflicts out into the open where their special claims can be seen and appraised, where…

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The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education — or that the object and reward of learning is…

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Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects…

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The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. . . . [A] government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful…

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What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and…

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The good society was, like the good self, a diverse yet harmonious, growing yet unified whole, a fully participatory democracy in which…

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Doctrine that eliminates or even obscures the function of choice of values and enlistment of desires and emotions in behalf of those…

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Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own…

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Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. . . . This faith…

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As believers in democracy we have not only the right but the duty to question existing mechanisms of, say, suffrage and to…

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The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued…

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The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot…

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We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it…

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No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can…

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More by John Dewey

“The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.”

“Empirically, things are poignant, tragic, beautiful, humorous, settled, disturbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh, consoling, splendid, fearful; are such immediately and in their own right…

A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view…

Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or information and…

A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it sets store, are connected with fighting…

The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.

Doctrine that eliminates or even obscures the function of choice of values and enlistment of desires and emotions in behalf of those chosen weakens…

There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts…

Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come…

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply…

Even the alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse…

“When the organization called soul is free, moving and operative, initial as well as terminal, it is spirit. Qualities are both static, substantial, and…

Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more…

Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other.