“It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.”

I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is … for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.

We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.

If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.

Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?

It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.

Even logical positivists are capable of love.

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis – about the meaning of what we say – and there is all of this … all of life.

The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.

We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a ‘reality’transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

Theism is so confused and the sentences in which “God” appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.

Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.

What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

My last name is originally Irish. I’m not exactly sure whereabouts it’s from, but I’ve got family branches that were traced back there.

To scenes by memory’s silver chain Close-linked, and ever yet apart, That like the vine, whose tendrils young Around some fostering branch have clung, Grown with its growth, as tho’ it sprung From one united heart.

I am like a tree in a forest. Birds come to the tree, they sit on its branches and eat its fruits.

Now I remember every time I was with Shouji I felt better. You hugged me secretly with your heart, didn’t you? Now I want you to embrace me with all that warmth, with all your strength.

I am a particle physicist, which is the nearest branch to nuclear physics. So in that sense I was the sort of right connection with the subject of nuclear energy and so on.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn’t see Negroes hanging from its branches.