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The empiric easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to pretend-to make claims for which there is no justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others-to bluff.

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
Vermont
Dewey
Doe
Gets
Statistics
Make
Conditions
Routine
Quack
Beyond
Pretend
Bluff
Trust
Leaves
Bluffs
Knowledge
Begins
Quacks
Ability
Claims
Degenerates
Upon
Easily
Impose
Others
Luck
Justification

More quotes by John Dewey

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Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about data in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.
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The first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals.
John Dewey
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Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up.
John Dewey
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Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.
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Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid it has been liquefied. it is actively moving in all the currents of society itself
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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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.
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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 work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.
John Dewey
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Education is not preparation for life education is life itself.
John Dewey
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I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
John Dewey
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Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing.
John Dewey
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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 production, exchange, the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication.
John Dewey
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To avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the formation of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes an increasingly delicate task with every development of special schooling.
John Dewey
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As we have seen there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences, by setting up certain preference and aversion, and making it easier or harder to act for this or that end.
John Dewey
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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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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
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When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.
John Dewey
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Thought is impossible without words.
John Dewey
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Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.
John Dewey
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It has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, as intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.
John Dewey