All over the Internet you can find this quotation, attributed to John Dewey:
The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.
Sometimes there will be quotation marks around “the desire to be important.”
As we all know, misattributed quotations are a staple in this world, so I’d love to learn the source (book? article? speech?) of the quotation and whether it’s been set down accurately.
I’ve done lots of Google searching (regular and Scholar), and have looked in two physical books (a 1950s Bartlett’s and a 1980 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations). No luck.
Does anyone know if this is an actual quotation from John Dewey, and if so, from where it comes?