But a belief in intellectual freedom where it does not exist contributes only to complacency in virtual enslavement, to sloppiness, superficiality and recourse to sensations as a substitute for ideas: marked traits of our present estate with respect to social knowledge.
Dewey warns that false beliefs in intellectual freedom can lead to complacency and superficiality.
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If the technological age can provide mankind with a firm and general basis of material security, it will be absorbed in a humane age.
Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained.
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…
Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought.