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Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general liberty, so to speak, at large.

John Dewey

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John Dewey
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: October 20
Died: 1952
Died: June 1
Aesthetician
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Professor
Psychologist
Sociologist
Teacher
Trade Unionist
Burlington
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Dewey
Liberty
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Speak
Effective
Power
Abstract
Ideas
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Thing
Large
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More quotes by John Dewey

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Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal.
John Dewey
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By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.
John Dewey
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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
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Not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience it stimulates and enriches imagination it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought.
John Dewey
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An education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him.
John Dewey
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There is not, in fact, any such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from use of the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change. Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the attitude of another.
John Dewey
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As a matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected. Each household with its immediate extension of friends makes a society the village or street group of playmates is a community each business group, each club, is another.
John Dewey
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Inside the modern city, in spite of its nominal political unity, there are probably more communities, more differing customs, traditions, aspirations, and forms of government or control, than existed in an entire continent at an earlier epoch.
John Dewey
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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
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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
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All direction is but re-direction it shifts the activities already going on into another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in operation, one's attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss.
John Dewey
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That education is not an affair of telling and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached it is lectured it is written about.
John Dewey
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Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.
John Dewey
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While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing.
John Dewey
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The end justifies the means only when the means used are such as actually bring about the desired and desirable end.
John Dewey
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In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity, to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educates others into slaves.
John Dewey
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The school has the function of coordinating within the disposition of each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments into which he enters.
John Dewey
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We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all.
John Dewey
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Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving…conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.
John Dewey
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Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.
John Dewey