John Dewey Quotes

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you

Teaching how to think is better than lecturing how to do it.

As it is, lovers of inquiry must follow their beloved wherever it may lead.

I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant, to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers - at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think!

I began to realize that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.

Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce.

Without theory we can only copy.

I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought.

It is always the task of the intellectual to "think otherwise." This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.

Sometimes people think you’re smart if you question the status quo, if nothing else.

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another.

First doubt, then inquire, then discover. This has been the process with all our great thinkers.

What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.

Don’t just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.

Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.

An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.

But he who neither thinks for himself nor learns from others, is a failure as a man.

Philosophy means thinking things out for oneself. Ultimately, there can be only one true philosophy, since reason is one and we all live in the same world.

As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him.

The real basic power of an individual isn't what he or she knows; it's the ability to think and learn and face new challenges.

Any school for free citizens must begin by teaching distrust, not trust. It must teach questioning, not acceptance of stock answers.

The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.

Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you.