Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, the which in every language I pronounce, stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
You know how gossip is. It’s the toxic waste of small towns.
You can go on blackening people’s reputations for years, and everyone will believe you, more or less, even when it’s perfectly obvious that you’re lying.
Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity – so it be new, there’s no respect how vile – that is not quickly buzzed into his ears?
The idle tittle-tattle is very wrong and unkind, but it is so often true.
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Rumour is a pipe blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures and of so easy and so plain a stop that the blunt monster with uncounted heads, the still-discordant wavering multitude, can play upon it.
No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues, but only about their secret vices.
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.
Inestimable harm may be done by foolish wagging of tongues in ill-natured gossip.
In the provinces there is always a valve or a faucet through which gossip leaks from one social set to another.[En province, il existe plus d’une soupape par laquelle les commérages s’échappent d’une société dans l’autre.]
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
