Intellectually religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

A moral principle is not a command to act or to forbear acting in a given way: it is a tool for analyzing a special situation, the right or wrong being determined by the situation in its entirety, not by the rule as such.

Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.

Giving and taking of orders modifies actions and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.

An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us. We cannot achieve recovery of primitive naïveté. But there is attainable a cultivated naïveté of eye, ear and thought.

When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently.