No one gossips about other people's secret virtues

This line is genuinely Russell's, drawn from On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), in the chapter on "The Aims of Education." As it circulates today it is a truncation: Russell's full sentence reads that the widespread interest in gossip is inspired not by a love of knowledge but by malice, and that "no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices" — a characteristically dry Russellian point he rounds off by noting that most gossip is therefore untrue, yet no one takes care to verify it. The exact wording appears in the book itself and is quoted from it in reputable reference works, including the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all pointing to the same source. We found no rival claimant and no earlier appearance of the phrase, which is unsurprising given how firmly it sits within a specific published Russell passage. Readers should simply know that the crisp one-liner they usually see is the tail end of a longer, sharper sentence about human malice.