On Gossip: Thoughts from People Wiser than Myself
What is told in the ear of a man is often heard 100 miles away.
~Chinese Proverb
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
--Oscar Wilde
Have I inadvertently said some evil thing?
--Phocion
The best ammunition against lies is the truth, there is no ammunition against gossip. It is like a fog and the clear wind blows it away and the sun burns it off.
--Ernest Hemingway quotes
If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
~Alice Duer Miller
What you don't see with your eyes, don't witness with your mouth.
--Jewish Proverb
A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.
~Ouida
Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you.
~Spanish Proverb
Do not repeat anything you will not sign your name to.
~Author Unknown
It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.
~Errol Flynn
Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell.
~Shana Alexander
Who brings a tale takes two away.
~Irish Proverb
A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way.
~John Tudor
We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them.
--Cato the Elder
There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly behooves any of us, to talk about the rest of us.
--Edward Wallis Hoch
I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth;
but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others,
and upon proper occasions speak all the good I know of everybody.
~Benjamin Franklin
There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
~Edward Wallis Hoch
If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence. ~Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
The biggest liar in the world is They Say.
~Douglas Malloch
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, July 1735
There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world,
and the worst of it is that half of them are true.
~Winston Churchill
It is just as cowardly to judge an absent person as it is wicked to strike a defenseless one. Only the ignorant and narrow-minded gossip, for they speak of persons instead of things.
--Lawrence G. Lovasik quotes (Slovak Priest, b.1913)
Fire and swords are slow engines of destruction, compared to the tongue of a Gossip.
--Richard Steele, Sr.
Never tell evil of a man, if you do not know it for certainty, and if you know it for a certainty, then ask yourself, 'Why should I tell it?'
--Johann K. Lavater
Great people talk about ideas.
Average people talk about things.
Small people talk about other people.
--Unknown
