“The commitment to enlarged thought is morally and politically significant in that it fosters the ‘ability to think without rules’, to cultivate judgement and conscience capable of thinking through the purposes and consequences of our actions from different perspectives, without proceeding in automatic fashion through obedience to pre-existing social conventions.”

“The Seven Social Sins are: Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice. Politics without principle.From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.”

“What are the qualities of human greatness that create history? Every time, if we think far enough, it is an ability to look through the confusion of the moment and see the moral issue involved; it is a refusal to allow a fundamental sense of justice to be distorted; it is the ability to listen to the voice of conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded people, so that they gather together around each other, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, and make a new period in history.”

“Groups are capable of being as moral and inteligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own, and is capable of anything except inteligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.”

“Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.”

“There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules ... intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? ... Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?”