John Dewey

It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need.

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

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

Education is life itself.

Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.

There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.

- John Dewey