The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life.
John DeweyThe scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified.
John DeweyConflict 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 contrivingโฆconflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.
John DeweyNo system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others.
John DeweyEvery society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse.
John DeweyThe 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