John Dewey...on ideas at work
To magnify thought and ideas for their own sake apart from what they do...is to refuse to learn the lesson of the most authentic kind of knowledge - the experimental - and it is to reject the idealism which involves responsibility. To praise thinking above action because there is so much ill-considered action in the world is to help maintain the kind of a world in which action accurs for narrow and transient purposes. To seek after ideas and to cling to them as means of conducting operations, as factors in practical arts, is to participate in creating a world in which the springs of thinking will be clear and ever-flowing.
- The Quest for Certainty, 1929