Sunday, October 12, 2008 – Rumor and Innuendo
If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me. ~ Alice Roosevelt Longworth
The Puritan’s idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business. ~ Wendell Phillips
Gossip needn’t be false to be evil – there’s a lot of truth that shouldn’t be passed around. ~ Frank A. Clark
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
Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell. ~ Shana Alexander
A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way. ~ John Tudor
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
I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs. ~ Andy Warhol
I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman
A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent. ~ Maya Angelou
The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion. ~ Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield
The distinction between liberty and licentiousness is a repetition of the Protean doctrine of implication, which is ever ready to work its ends by varying its shape. ~ James Madison
Defamation is becoming a necessity of life; inasmuch as a dish of tea in the morning or evening cannot be digested without this stimulant. ~ Thomas Jefferson
Where it concerns himself, Who’s angry at a slander, makes it true. ~ Ben Jonson, Catiline (act III, sc. 1)
Your tittle-tattlers, and those who listen to slander, by my good will should all be hanged – the former by their tongues, the latter by the ears. [Homines qui gestant, quique auscultant crimina, Si meo arbitratu liceat, omnes pendeant, Gestores linguis, auditores auribus.] ~ Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus), Pseudolus (I, 5, 12)
And truly, I’ll devise some honest slanders To stain my cousin with. One doth not know How much an ill word may empoison liking. ~ William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (Hero at III, i)
A slander is like a hornet; if you can’t kill it dead the first time, better not strike at it. ~ Josh Billings
Slander is the revenge of a coward, and dissimulation of his defense. ~ Samuel Johnson
If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written. ~ Samuel Johnson
The worthiest people are the most injured by slander, as is the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at. ~ Jonathan Swift
Life would be a perpetual flea-hunt if a man were obliged to run down all the innuendoes, inveracities, insinuations and suspicions which are uttered against him. ~ Henry Ward Beecher
Slugs crawl and crawl over our cabbages, like the world’s slander over a good name. You may kill them, it is true; but there is the slime. ~ Douglas William Jerrold
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us. ~ F. H. Bradley
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
Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress. ~ Liz Smith
What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it. ~ Oscar Wilde
Random Observations:
Television is the first truly democratic culture – the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want. ~ Clive Barnes
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. ~ Samuel Johnson
Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck. ~ George Carlin
You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jellybeans. ~ Ronald Reagan
You have got to be careful quoting Ronald Reagan, because when you quote him accurately it is called mudslinging. ~ Fritz Mondale
We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck
Just Above Sunset 