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Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectiveness—the emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

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Freedom

More quotes by John Dewey

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

The Quest for Certainty (1929)

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

Experience and Nature (1925)

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

The true antithesis of nature is not art but arbitrary conceit, fantasy, and stereotyped convention.

Art as Experience (1934)

Coleridge said that every work of art must have about it something not understood to obtain its full effect.

Art as Experience (1934)

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What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?

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Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features.

Freeman Dyson Infinite in All Directions (1988)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Dewey (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.