John Dewey Quotes

I am amazed at the facility with which some men follow in the wake of slavery.

There is social intimidation by the self-appointed brigades of the thought police… they exist in every society, whether they are of the religious, nationalistic or atheistic variety. Dogmatists, who are convinced that they know better, that only the way they think is acceptable and who would deprive others of their right to hear differing and discordant voices.. They try to achieve this by either silencing the author or scaring away the public.

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

Any society that starts forbidding certain words or expressions is a society you should be wary about, whether it's the KGB or social consensus that enforces it.

I think there's always going to be some kind of bigotry or some kind of racism. There has to be, because people can't feel that they have any hero qualities unless there's someone beneath them.

This idea of walls, segregation, labels, and 'You against us' and 'We are superior and you are inferior.' Which people are legitimate? Which relationships are legitimate or not? Who declares that under which authority? These are things that are hugely important.

The slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.

Women were the slave class that maintained the species in order to free the other half for the business of the world.

[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own.

I don't think it's entirely paranoid to suspect that one day, you won't be able to so much as question the primary tenets of anti-racism without going to jail.

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race - the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.

One man to live in pleasure and wealth, whiles all other weap and smart for it, that is the part not of a king, but of a jailor.

There, where one burns books... one, in the end, burns men.

Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs.

Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master.

This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end

Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society.

All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freemen.

Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal.

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

What matter the colour of the collar around a man's neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?

The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.

Where books are burnt, men finish up being burnt too.

The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.