The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.
Hunger not to have, but to be.
Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.
We only think when we are confronted with problems.
Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.
Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire.
Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.
Purposeful action is thus the goal of all that is truly educative.
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import.
Intelligent thinking means an increment of freedom in action-an emancipation from chance and fatality. ‘Thought’ represents the suggestion of a way of response that is different from that which would have been followed if intelligent observation had not effected an inference as to the future.
Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.
The best preparation for the future is a well-spent today.
What’s in a question, you ask? Everything. It evokes stimulating responses or stultifies inquiry. It is, in essence, the very core of teaching.
To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions – that is art.
For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention.