Insinuations that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is my brother are absurd and offensive.
Remember this about any slander. Denial only emphasizes, and gives added importance to falsehood. Let it alone and it will die for want of nourishment.
For enemies carry about slander not in the form in which it took its rise . The scandal of men is everlasting; even then does it survive when you would suppose it to be dead.
People are going to talk bad about you no matter who you are.
The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting - the war and the revolution - and the character of the accused - revolutionary leaders of millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power - you can say without exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history.
Whatever defamation of character my enemies are spreading about me, I do not feel the need to justify myself toward them. While discretion obliges me to remain silent, my duty compels me to prevent them from doing any more harm.
Life would be a perpetual flea hunt if a man were obliged to run down all the innuendoes, inveracities, and insinuations and misrepresentations which are uttered against him.
A lot of nasty and untrue things have been said about me.
Unscrupulous agitators have been at work spreading atrocity stories which can only be compared with those lies that were fabricated by the same instigators at the beginning of the Great War.
It's very painful to have something that's not true written about you.
Gossip is conversation about people.
On Rumor's tongue continual slanders ride.
It has been my policy not to respond to each of the many canards which have been part of the campaign to discredit my investigation, nor to waste time trying to prove negatives.
Many take pleasure in spreading abroad the weakness of an exalted character.
Yet have I ever heard it said that spies and tale-bearers have done more mischief in this world than poisoned bowl or the assassin's dagger.
Of every ten persons who talk about you, nine will say something bad, and the tenth will say something good in a bad way.
CALUMNUS, n. A graduate of the School for Scandal.
Let nobody speak mischief of anybody.
It has been rumoured that I was the brains of the robbery, but that was totally incorrect. I've been described as the tea boy, which is also incorrect.
Gossip is hardly uplifting.
Slander-mongers and those who listen to slander, if I had my way, would all be strung up, the talkers by the tongue, the listeners by the ears.
Infamous Greek calumnies
See Constantine I {598591}
Misrepresentation, false propaganda, innuendoes soon sprout into poisonous weeds, and before long the people find themselves victims of a pollution that has robbed them of their individual liberty and enslaved them to a group of political gangsters.
A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof. The throwing out [of] malicious imputations against any character leaves a stain, which no after-refutation can wipe out. To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said. The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.
It is only before those who are glad to hear it, and anxious to spread it, that we find it easy to speak ill of others.
