Bertrand Russell Quotes

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

No man is infallible.

The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men Gang aft a-gley

We turn to experts to tell us the future, even though they have not the foggiest idea themselves. It is a practice that goes back thousands of years.

You should never trust the experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.

I have been wrong enough times to know that it is always a possibility.

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.

All humans make mistakes. But there is no room or allowance in the fevered world of conspiracy theorists for mistakes, human errors, anomalies, or plain incompetence, though the latter, from the highest levels on down, is endemic to our society.

That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry.

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?

Nobody gets lucky all the time. Nobody can win all the time. Nobody's a robot. Nobody's perfect.

I think it's important for scientists to be a bit less arrogant, a bit more humble, recognising we are capable of making mistakes and being fallacious - which is increasingly serious in a society where our work may have unpredictable consequences.

Where facts are few, experts are many.

No one is always right.

Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.

Something will turn up.

But what if our intelligence is wrong?

If officials on the spot commit in good faith an error of judgment, which is worse—to support them or to throw them over?

Fearing the weakness of democracy, men have always sought safety in technocrats. But ... [we] have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down before the divine right of experts.

If there is a wrong way to do something, then someone will do it.

Our intelligence is always imperfect.

Whoever reviews the operations of government in this country since the Revolution, will find few, even of the most questionable measures of administration, about which the best instructed judgment might not have doubted at the time, but of which he may affirm, with certainty, that they were indifferent to the greatest part of those who concurred in them.

In our "age of the expert" the expert has his constituency — those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions; elaborating and defining the consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an expert.