John Dewey

They persist as emotional cries rather than as reasoned ideas.

The social situation has been so changed by the factors of an industrial age that traditional general principles have little practical meaning.

Gibes at inconsistency are, however, as irrelevant as they are easy.

Again the voter may by personal predilection or inherited belief incline towards magnifying the scope of local governments and inveigh against the evils of centralization.

Probably not one voter in a thousand even reads the scores of pages in which the rates of toll are enumerated and he would not be much wiser if he did.

For the average voter to-day the tariff question is a complicated medley of infinite detail, schedules of rates specific and ad valorem on countless things, many of which he does not recognize by name, and with respect to which he can form…

It did not involve much mental strain to imagine that by throwing in his lot with one party or another he could so express his views that his belief would count in government.

At present, many consequences are felt rather than perceived; they are suffered, but they cannot be said to be known, for they are not, by those who experience them, referred to their origins.

An inchoate public is capable of organization only when indirect consequences are perceived, and when it is possible to project agencies which order their occurrence.

When deflation came it found a restricted market, increased costs of production, and farmers burdened with mortgages lightly assumed during the period of frenzied expansion.

The industrial and commercial relations that created the situation of which the war is a manifestation are as evident in small things as great.

In general, the non-political forces are the expressions of a technological age injected into an inherited political scheme which operates to deflect and distort their normal operation.