John Dewey

Thousands feel their hollowness even if they cannot make their feeling articulate.

The old principles do not fit contemporary life as it is lived, however well they may have expressed the vital interests of the times in which they arose.

Only habit and tradition, rather than reasoned conviction, together with a vague faith in doing one’s civic duty, send to the polls a considerable percentage of the fifty per cent. who still vote.

When traditional war-cries have lost their import in practical policies which are consonant with them, they are readily dismissed as bunk.

Political apathy, which is a natural product of the discrepancies between actual practices and traditional machinery, ensues from inability to identify one’s self with definite issues.

The irony of history is nowhere more evident than in the reversal of the practical meaning of the term “liberalism” in spite of a literal continuity of theory.

In most other countries, the “liberal” party is that which represents established and vested commercial and financial interests in protest against governmental regulation.

He it is that now wants to be let alone, and who utters the war-cry of liberty for private industry, thrift, contract and their pecuniary fruit.

To-day the industrial-property régime being established, the doctrine is the intellectual bulwark of the standpatter and reactionary.

A striking example of the shift of the actual tenor of doctrines--that is, of their consequences in application--is presented in the history of the doctrine of Individualism, interpreted to signify a minimum of governmental “interference”…

The forest cannot be seen for the trees nor the trees for the forest.

The developments of industry and commerce have so complicated affairs that a clear-cut, generally applicable, standard of judgment becomes practically impossible.