Alexander Pope Quotes

Queen Mary had a way of interrupting tattle about elopements, duels, and play debts, by asking the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read her favorite sermon--Dr. Tillotson on Evil Speaking.

If it were not for a goodly supply of rumors, half true and half false, what would the gossips do?

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

Any man familiar with public life realizes the foul gossip which ripples just under the surface about almost every public man, and especially about every President

Magazines started insinuating that I was having affairs with my co-stars. That hurt.

The film business talks a lot. People talk a lot. There's a lot of chatting. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes chatting. There's a lot of talking before you go and do it.

Sometimes people chat loosely. Sometimes people just speak their minds and what's on their mind ain't necessarily real or facts, so I don't take it too serious. I'm more interested in making the music, I don't really play that.

People take toasting way too seriously - especially the clinking glasses part. There are always a few people who are seated too far away from each other to easily clink.

In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.

A week went by and nothing. But eventually, as they always will, the rumors reached me. And everyone knows you can't disprove a rumor.

You know the difference between news and gossip, don't you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire; Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

There would not be so many open mouths if there were not so many open ears.

Oh yeah, gossip. I heard you on the secret wireless. You know the devil's radio child.

I have criticized absent people so often, and then discovered, to my humiliation, that I was talking with their relatives, that I have grown superstitious about that sort of thing and dropped it.

Rumors chase the dead like flies, and we follow them with our prim noses. None of us are gossips, but we love listening to those who are.

Gossips are frogs, they drinke and talke.

The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year's Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?

Talk often, but never long; in that case, if you do not please, at least you are sure not to tire your hearers. Pay your own reckoning, but do not treat the whole company; this being one of the few cases in which people do not care to be treated, every one being fully convinced that he has wherewithal to pay.

My neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will.

Gossip, public, private, social - to fight against it either by word or pen seems, after all, like fighting with shadows. Everybody laughs at it, protests against it, blames and despises it; yet everybody does it, or at least encourages others in it: quite innocently, unconsciously, in such a small, harmless fashion - yet we do it. We must talk about something, and it is not all of us who can find a rational topic of conversation, or discuss it when found.

The world of rumors and gossip is a world of wish fulfillment. And one of the things that gives volume and amplitude to a rumor is that it satisfies people's dreams and expectations about the world...

gossip ... is only fiction produced by non-professionals.