John Dewey: “Why should the public and its officers, even if the latter are termed statesmen, be wiser and more effective?”

The easiest way out was to go back to the naked individual, to sweep away all associations as foreign to his nature and rights save as they proceeded from his own voluntary choice, and guaranteed his own private ends.

The invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life.

What is significant is that access to means of amusement has been rendered easy and cheap beyond anything known in the past.

Nor can the liberating and confirming results of public action be construed to yield a wholesale idealization of states in contrast with other associations.