John Dewey Quotes

The Germans are prisoners of their past.

Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.

Many demons are in woods, in waters, in wildernesses, and in dark poolly places ready to hurt and prejudice people; some are also in the thick black clouds, which cause hail, lightning and thunder, and poison the air, the pastures and grounds.

The history of the past is a mere puppet-show. A little man comes out and blows a little trumpet, and goes in again. You look for something new, and lo! another little man comes out, and blows another little trumpet, and goes in again. And it is all over.

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.

We are chained hand and foot by protocol, enslaved to a static, empty world where men and women can’t read, where the scientific advances of the ages are the preserve of the rich, where artists and poets are doomed to endless repetitions and sterile reworking of past masterpieces. Nothing is new. New does not exist. Nothing changes, nothing grows, evolves, develops. Time has stopped. Progress is forbidden

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.

Of course, you've got to reckon with the burden of the past. You can't just easily dismiss it. It is a legacy and often you have to carry an albatross. And it won't happen until people are able to have a certain level of trust and try to speak to each other, not as caricatures but as people.

The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

Carrying the past in to the present, we program the future to continue the past. Letting go the past in the present, we free the future to be something else.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.

Profundity often goes past the issue to some deep but useless truth.

The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.

I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you always know what's hidden underneath.

To me, nostalgia is nothing more than a mindless plundering of the past for the commonplace.

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

The present is burthened too much with the past.

As human beings, even if we were to have tried to forget the past, if you dealt with it in a cavalier fashion, it would return to haunt you.

The power of the past does not depend on our knowledge of it.

...photographs are facts, but not necessarily true... The present always surpasses the past, and the future will not care about today.

In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes far worse than overt tyrannies.

Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart.

Heap on more wood! - the wind is chill; But let it whistle as it will, We'll keep our Christmas merry still.