Habits of opinion are the toughest of all habits; when they have become second nature, and are supposedly thrown out of the door, they creep in again as stealthily and surely as does first nature.
This statement reflects Dewey's understanding of how deeply ingrained habits of thought can resist change.
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Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought.
Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public.
The problem of securing diffused and seminal intelligence can be solved only in the degree in which local communal life becomes a reality.
So to the patent objection that the state is a very modern institution, it is replied that while modernity is a property of those structures which go by the name of states, yet all history, or almost all, records the exercise of analogous…