Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
Interpretation
Adapting completely to one's surroundings can lead to a loss of self. The quest for control over our environment is fundamental to how we respond to it.
This quote by John Dewey emphasizes the idea that total adaptation to one's environment is detrimental to personal growth and identity. Rather than losing ourselves in conformity, it is important to engage with and strive to control our surroundings, as this desire fuels our responses and shapes our experiences. The struggle for control reflects our individual agency and the intrinsic human need to influence and create meaningful interactions with the world.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal growth, I might reference this quote to highlight the importance of maintaining one's identity.
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
It science involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an βism becomes so involved in reaction against other βisms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.
I see tremendous imbalance in the world. A very uneven playing field, which has gotten tilted very badly. I consider it unstable. At the same time, I don't exactly see what is going to reverse it.
The texture and hardship of poverty and eviction is something that I think left the deepest impression on me, and I hope that I try to convey a little bit of that to the reader.
A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.
When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery.
All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.