Quotations about Gossip

If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me. ~Alice Roosevelt Longworth


What you don't see with your eyes, don't witness with your mouth. ~Jewish Proverb


What is told in the ear of a man is often heard 100 miles away. ~Chinese Proverb


No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. ~Bertrand Arthur William Russell, On Education, 1926


If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees. ~Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam


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


When you are in trouble, people who call to sympathize are really looking for the particulars. ~Edgar Watson Howe, Country Town Sayings, 1911


The easiest way to keep a secret is without help. ~Author Unknown


The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business. ~Wendell Phillips, attributed


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


Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules. ~Douglas Adams


Show me someone who never gossips, and I'll show you someone who isn't interested in people. ~Barbara Walters


Gossip needn't be false to be evil - there's a lot of truth that shouldn't be passed around. ~Frank A. Clark


It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people's business. ~Dolley Madison


I look at it this way. I'm not an eavesdropper; I have an attention surplus disorder. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper. ~Errol Flynn


To a friend, who asked him how to find out a girl's faults, he gave the sage advice to praise her to her girl friends. ~Edwin Lillie Miller, 1938, Explorations in Literature, about Benjamin Franklin (Thanks, Sam)


Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell. ~Shana Alexander


There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us. ~F.H. Bradley, Aphorisms


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


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


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


Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: Their measurements are being taken and compared. ~Erica Jong


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 best way to keep one's word is not to give it. ~Napoleon I, Maxims


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