Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.

A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others,thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.

Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.

For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

Since in every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens - all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say science incarnate.