Gossip

Sourced

• Gossip. It’s just a harmless form of recreation. It’s careless talk that deals in polite fiction. It's nasty speculation that's based on not so polite fact. How do we protect ourselves from the venomous sting of such idle gossip? The best way is just to tell the truth and wait for people to start talking about someone else.
  • Mary Alice Young
• "A woman and a mouse, they carry a tale wherever they go."
  • Gelett Burgess, The maxims of Methhuselah (1907)

• "He's my friend who speaks well of me behind my back."
  • Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia

• "To create an unfavourable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said."
  • William Hazlitt, Characteristics (1823)

• "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
  • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Unsourced

• "I hate to spread rumours, but what else can one do with them?"
  • Amanda Lear

• "Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man's. It is in the boys' gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower."
  • Phyllis McGinley

• "There are all kinds of rumors about me—and they’re all true, every one of them. You can make some up if you want."
  • Robert Mitchum

• "Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress."
  • Liz Smith

• “Wagging tongues depend on flapping ears.”
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov

• "Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip . . . But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."
  • Oscar Wilde

Proverbs

• Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you.
  • Spanish proverb

• Gossip needs no carriage.
  • Russian proverb

• Gossip is unbecoming an elder.
  • Yorba proverb

• If we all held our tongues, there wouldn't be much left to talk about.
  • English working class saying.