“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”

Source: Always True (Moody, 2011), p. 85

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: To me, when we talk about the world, we are talking about our ideas of the world. Our ideas of organisation, our different religions, our different economic systems, our ideas about it are the world. We are heading for a radical revision where you could say we are heading towards the end of the world, but more in the R. E. M. sense than the Revelation sense. That is what apocalypse means – revelation. I could square that with the end of the world, a revelation, a new way of looking at things, something that completely radicalises our notions of the where we were, when we were, what we were, something like that would constitute an end to the world in the kind of abstract – yet very real sense – that I am talking about. A change in the language, a change in the thinking, a change in the music. It wouldn’t take much – one big scientific idea, or artistic idea, one good book, one good painting – who knows – we are at a critical point where the ideas are coming thicker and faster and stranger and stranger than they ever were before. They are realised at a greater speed, everything has become very fluid.

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)

Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)
Context: Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.

"Doing Good — for the right reasons!" (13 March 2008)
Context: So let God know what you're doing just by doing it — or feel good about yourself. But don't rely on men and women to inspire you to do good — because we will probably often fail you with our own imperfections! We all should be trying to improve ourselves, regardless of how much better off or worse off we are than the person next to us, because we can all get better.

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1924/jun/18/imperial-preference in the House of Commons (18 June 1924).
1924

Essay on Creativity in Science and Engineering

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 3