All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate.

Nature as a whole is a progressive realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in any single plant or animal.

Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.

Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order

The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, can't terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.