John Dewey Quotes

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals.

Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command over one's self; order is power.

If some small storekeeper somewhere decides he's not going to pay the money, the Godfather doesn't let him get away with it. The money doesn't mean anything to him, but he sends in his goons to beat him to a pulp. You have to establish credibility, otherwise conformity to your orders will tend to erode. International affairs runs in much the same way.

To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.

When we speak of choice, what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible.

Shut up, Julius! I mean, quiet a moment, Commander.

The word 'freedom' means for me not a point of departure but a genuine point of arrival. The point of departure is defined by the word 'order.' Freedom cannot exist without the concept of order.

This is the difference between slavery and freedom. The slave must do what his superior orders him to do, but the free citizen-and this is what freedom means-is in a position to choose his own way of life.

In order to get the power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities which are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, cruelty.

We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may "conquer" them.

Going out to others in order to reach the fringes of humanity does not mean rushing out aimlessly into the world. Often it is better simply to slow down, to put aside our eagerness in order to see and listen to others, to stop rushing from one thing to another and to remain with someone who has faltered along the way.

If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end.

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.

Man is the most powerful creature on the planet. And we're arrogant. I mean, people own birds. It's like, there's a creature with the gift of flight. I want it. I'm going to put it in my kitchen and make it crap on old information.

When God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God.

Only one in command: that's the way in the home And the way in the state when it must find Measures best for mankind.

You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople." - J.R. Isidore

A world based on machine images is a world filled with boundaries. In a machine, every piece knows its place.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

In order to be loved, we have to love, which means we have to understand.

In order to become a success, a business doesn't just have to do well, it has to to better than its competitors. Being number one isn't just about bragging rights. Often it means the difference between prospering and merely hanging on.

By no means. I have just given you my serious and well-considered profession of faith. Although a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist. Listen to me.

The most effective way to close down the human mind and to manipulate its sense of self is to program into it some form of dogma. A dogma will always vehemently defend itself from other information and repel any alternative opinion which contradicts its narrow, solidified view. Dogmas become a person's sense of security and means of retaining power, and humanity tends to cling to both until its knuckles turn white. Dogmas take endless forms, and when you can persuade different people to hold opposing dogmas, the manipulation of conflict and control through "divide and rule" becomes easy.

If there be any one principle more widely than another confessed by every utterance, or more sternly than another imprinted on every atom of the visible creation, that principle is not liberty, but law.

One ideological claim is that private property is theft, that the natural product of the existence of property is evil, and that private ownership therefore should not exist... What those who feel this way don't realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control - that property is a system for the disposal of power. The absence of property almost always means the concentration of power in the state.