Influential Quotes by John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey

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…

— John Dewey

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

— John Dewey