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In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.
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Voltaire (Candide)
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Rumours and malicious gossip are like bindweed. They cannot be cut back, even with the sword of truth. I can, however, offer you this comfort. Given time, they will wither and die of their own volition.
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Anthony Horowitz (Magpie Murders (Susan Ryeland, #1))
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Religion is, in reality, living. Our religion is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our religion is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think - all these things - twenty-four hours a day. One's religion, then, is ones life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived.
Religion is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not theistic, it is not atheistic, it has little to do with what white people call "religion." It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion; if we experiment on living animals, that is our religion; if we cheat at cards, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do, and are, is our religion.
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Jack D. Forbes (Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism)
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...the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type.
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Elena Ferrante (The Days of Abandonment)
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Backstabbers and malicious people are not worth your attention, but you can thank them for deeming you worthy of theirs.
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J.S. Wolfe (The Pathology of Innocence)
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Gossip isn't scandal and its not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same
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Phyllis McGinley
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There was less bulimia and more fights than I had known as an undergrad, but the same feminine ethos was present—empathetic camaraderie and bawdy humor on good days, and histrionic dramas coupled with meddling, malicious gossip on bad days.
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Piper Kerman (Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison)
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That last phrase, the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type. I had something to learn.
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Elena Ferrante (The Days of Abandonment)
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Knowing themselves to be faultless, they make it their mission to detect the myriad faults in others, against which they wage incessant tongue.
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Heron Carvic (Witch Miss Seeton (Miss Seeton, #3))
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Crime was up, especially among the youth; simple, common trust in one’s neighbor was diminishing; never had the town been so full of rumors, scandals, and malicious gossip. In the shadow of fear and suspicion, life here was gradually losing its joy and simplicity, and no one seemed to know why or how.
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Frank E. Peretti (This Present Darkness (Darkness, #1))
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So all of this agony was for nothing?"
"You exposed us to malicious gossip for nothing."
"You were cruel."
"So were you."
"You hurt me."
"And you hurt me. Is revenge everything you dreamed it might be?
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Sylvain Reynard (Gabriel's Inferno (Gabriel's Inferno, #1))
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But such gossip cannot be confronted. Rumours and malicious gossip are like bindweed. They cannot be cut back, even with the sword of truth. I can, however, offer you this comfort. Given time, they will wither and die of their own volition.
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Anthony Horowitz (Magpie Murders (Susan Ryeland #1))
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He had always assumed gossip to be the malicious whispering of uncomfortable truths not the fabrication of absurdities. How was one to protect oneself against people making up things Was a life of careful impeccable behavior not enough in a world where inventions were passed around as fact
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Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew's Last Stand)
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But when I was a child, the grown-ups taught us to ignore malicious gossip, and never to dignify it with a response.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family)
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But such gossip cannot be confronted. Rumours and malicious gossip are like bindweed. They cannot be cut back, even with the sword of truth.
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Anthony Horowitz (Magpie Murders (Susan Ryeland #1))
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Rumours and malicious gossip are like bindweed. They cannot be cut back, even with the sword of truth.
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Anthony Horowitz (Magpie Murders (Susan Ryeland, #1))
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Certain persons are malicious solely through a necessity for talking. Their conversation, the chat of the drawing-room, gossip of the anteroom, is like those chimneys which consume wood rapidly; they need a great amount of combustibles; and their combustibles are furnished by their neighbors.
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Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
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No one pries as effectively into other people’s business as those whose business it most definitely is not… What for? For nothing. For the sake of finding out, knowing, penetrating the mystery. Out of an itching need to be able to tell. And often, once these secrets are out, the mysteries broadcast, the enigmas exposed to the light of day, they lead to catastrophe, duels, bankruptcies, ruined families, shattered existences-to the great joy of those who “got to the bottom of it all” for no apparent reason and through sheer instinct. Sad. Some people are malicious out of a simple need to have something to say. Their conversation, parlour talk, antechamber gossip, is reminiscent of those fireplaces that swiftly go through the wood-they need a lot of fuel and the fuel is their neighbour.
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Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
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From my tutor: not to become a 5Green or Blue supporter at the races, or side with the Lights or Heavies in the amphitheatre; to tolerate pain and feel few needs; to work with my own hands and mind my own business; to be deaf to malicious gossip.
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Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
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Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored.20
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Kay Arthur (A Marriage Without Regrets: No matter where you are or where you've been, you can have…)
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malicious blather craves a gullible audience
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Neil Mach (Ask Phyliss Fannock)
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We are a nation of fence-sitters, face-flatterers and back-biters.
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Khushwant Singh (More Malicious Gossip)
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If people with good reputations are a resource for whom others compete, this leads to all the dirty tricks that people use against one another when they are competing for something of value. One such move is to “poison the well,” to destroy the perceived value of the resource. When the resource is a person’s reputation, some individuals will spread malicious gossip to destroy or damage it (Roland Barthes described this as “murder by language”).
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David Livingstone Smith (Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind)
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The secret lies in the method of work; in taking advantage of as much time as possible for the activity; in not retiring for the day until at least two or three hours are dedicated to the task; in wisely constructing a dike in front of the intellectual dispersion and waste of time required by social activity; and finally, in avoiding as much as possible the malicious gossip of the café and other entertainment—which squanders our nervous energy (sometimes even causing disgust) and draws us away from our main task with childish conceits and futile pursuits.
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Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Advice for a Young Investigator)
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But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. 2For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, 4treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these. 6For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, 7always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
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Anonymous (New American Standard Bible - NASB 1995 (Without Translators' Notes))
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Nothing goes unobserved in that strict town where people lack occupation. Malicious curiosity there has even invented what is known as a busybody, that is a double mirror fixed to the outside of the windowledge so that the streets can be monitored even from inside the houses, all the comings and goings watched, a kind of trap to catch all the exits and entrances the encounters and gestures that do not realize they are being observed, the looks that prove everything.
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Georges Rodenbach (The Bells of Bruges)
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Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by subordinates on their superiors, it represents a relatively safe social sanction. Gossip, almost by definition has no identifiable author, but scores of eager retailers who can claim they are just passing on the news. Should the gossip—and here I have in mind malicious gossip—be challenged, everyone can disavow responsibility for having originated it. The Malay term for gossip and rumor, khabar angin (news on the wind), captures the diffuse quality of responsibility that makes such aggression possible.
The character of gossip that distinguishes it from rumor is that gossip consists typically of stories that are designated to ruin the reputation of some identifiable person or persons. If the perpetrators remain anonymous, the victim is clearly specified. There is, arguably, something of a disguised democratic voice about gossip in the sense that it is propagated only to the extent that others find it in their interest to retell the story.13 If they don’t, it disappears. Above all, most gossip is a discourse about social rules that have been violated. A person’s reputation can be damaged by stories about his tightfistedness, his insulting words, his cheating, or his clothing only if the public among whom such tales circulate have shared standards of generosity, polite speech, honesty, and appropriate dress. Without an accepted normative standard from which degrees of deviation may be estimated, the notion of gossip would make no sense whatever. Gossip, in turn, reinforces these normative standards by invoking them and by teaching anyone who gossips precisely what kinds of conduct are likely to be mocked or despised.
13. The power to gossip is more democratically distributed than power, property, and income, and, certainly, than the freedom to speak openly. I do not mean to imply that gossip cannot and is not used by superiors to control subordinates, only that resources on this particular field of struggle are relatively more favorable to subordinates. Some people’s gossip is weightier than that of others, and, providing we do not confuse status with mere public deference, one would expect that those with high personal status would be the most effective gossipers.
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James C. Scott (Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts)
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Isydoris shot Azhrael an incredulous glare and whispered in dismay, “You are going to have a man gutted alive for spreading gossip?!”
“No, of course not. Gutting him alive is not enough. I have also ordered them to cut out his tongue,” he joked in a calm tone, then turned deadly serious. “Nobody speaks ill of my woman.”
Isydoris shook her head in numb disbelief. “But what would be the point of such barbaric punishment? This man will die, and people will continue to talk. Even you cannot silence every malicious tongue in the empire.”
“Watch me,” he proclaimed with firm determination. “My sweet, it remains to be seen what I cannot accomplish by the sheer force of my will. I do not care how much blood needs to be spilled, but the commoners will learn to utter your name with caution and respect. I shall settle for nothing less.
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Astrid Jane Ray (The Queen of Aessarion)
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BITCH THE POT Tea and gossip go together. At least, that’s the stereotypical view of a tea gathering: a group of women gathered around the teapot exchanging tittle-tattle. As popularity of the beverage imported from China (‘tea’ comes from the Mandarin Chinese cha) increased, it became particularly associated with women, and above all with their tendency to gossip. Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue lists various slang terms for tea, including ‘prattle-broth’, ‘cat-lap’ (‘cat’ being a contemporary slang for a gossipy old woman), and ‘scandal broth’. To pour tea, meanwhile, was not just to ‘play mother’, as one enduring English expression has it, but also to ‘bitch the pot’ – to drink tea was to simply ‘bitch’. At this time a bitch was a lewd or sensual woman as well as a potentially malicious one, and in another nineteenth-century dictionary the phraseology is even more unguarded, linking tea with loose morals as much as loquaciousness: ‘How the blowens [whores] lush the slop. How the wenches drink tea!’ The language of tea had become another vehicle for sexism, and a misogynistic world view in which the air women exchanged was as hot as the beverage they sipped. ‘Bitch party’ and ‘tabby party’ (again the image of cattiness) were the terms of choice for such gossipy gatherings. Men, it seems, were made of stronger stuff, and drank it too. Furthermore, any self-respecting man would ensure his wife and daughters stayed away from tea. The pamphleteer and political writer William Cobbett declared in 1822: The gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. The girl that has been brought up, merely to boil the tea kettle, and to assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to affix his affections upon her. In the twenty-first century, to ‘spill the T’ has become a firm part of drag culture slang for gossiping. T here may stand for either ‘truth’ or the drink, but either way ‘weak tea’ has come to mean a story that doesn’t quite hold up – and it’s often one told by women. Perhaps it’s time for bitches to make a fresh pot.
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Susie Dent (Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year)
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Gossip, even malicious rumors, are worth more than the most expensive publicity campaign in the world.
What alarmed me most in the course of my stay in the United States was the habit of spending enormous sums of money in order to achieve so little real luxury. America represents the triumph of quantity over quality. Mass production triumphs; men and women both prefer to buy a multitude of mediocre things rather than a smaller number, carefully chosen. The American woman, faithful to the ideal of optimism with the United States seems to have made its rule of life, spends money entirely in order to gratify the collective need to buy. She prefers three new dresses to one beautiful one and does not linger over a choice, knowing perfectly well that her fancy will be of short duration and the dress which she is in the process of buying will be discarded very soon.
The prime need of fashion is to please and attract. Consequently this attraction cannot be born of uniformity, the mother of boredom.
Contemporary elegance is at once simple and natural.
Since there is no patience where vanity is concerned, any client who is kept waiting considers it a personal insult.
The best bargain in the world is a successful dress. It brings happiness to the woman who wears it and it is never too dear for the man who pays for it. The most expensive dress in the world is a dress which is a failure. It infuriates the woman who wears it and it is a burden to the man who pays for it. In addition, it practically always involves him in the purchase of a second dress much more expensive - the only thing that can blot out the memory of the first failure.
Living in a house which does not suit you is like wearing someone else's clothes.
There will always be women who cling to a particular style of dress because they wore it during the time of their greatest happiness, but white hair is the only excuse for this type of eccentricity.
The need for display, which is dormant in all of us, can express itself nowadays in fashion and nowhere else.
The dresses of this collection may be worn by only a few of the thousands of women who read and dream about them, but high fashion need not be directly accessible to everyone: it need only exist in the world for its influence to be felt.
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Christian Dior (Christian Dior and I)
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For instance, verse 29: “Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip.” Wait a second. This doesn’t sound like any of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people I know, and I know a lot of them. So maybe this is talking about something else? As always, context is key.
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Susan Cottrell (Radically Included: The Biblical Case for Radical Love and Inclusion: 49 Verses That Will Change Your Life, Change Your Love, and Set Your Heart Free!)
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Malicious gossip is the death of the soul.
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Peter France (Hermits; The Insights of Solitude)
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gossip was what brought her to life. Malicious gossip suited her best,
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Ann Cleeves (The Moth Catcher (Vera Stanhope #7))
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Bullies use various power tactics, such as spreading malicious gossip, excessive criticism, withholding resources or information, excluding a targeted person from the group, and other devious behaviors intended to undermine the confidence and performance of others. Bullies often take aggressive action against individuals in an effort to control and have power over them.
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Alex Pattakos (Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl's Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work)
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If your dream is to become spiritually enlightened, but you're still judging others harshly and engaging in malicious gossip, you send contradictory vibrations into the universe
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Katy J. Lee (The Angel Numbers 101 Book: Discover What Your Spirit Guides Are Trying to Tell You and The Meaning Behind 11:11 And Other Numbers (Law of Attraction))
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Small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so [people] should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.
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Susan Pollack
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One thing Mr Chaudhuri has overlooked in his remarkable thesis on Hinduism: no religious community in India would take this tarring and feathering of all that they hold sacred save the Hindus.
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Khushwant Singh (More Malicious Gossip)
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(Whichever way you look there is a din of tumult; Whichever way you go there are flames and torches; For tonight this world is heavy with labour pain; To give birth to a world which will forever remain.)
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Khushwant Singh (More Malicious Gossip)
Khushwant Singh (Malicious Gossip)
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Lord Jesus said we would have to give an account “for every careless word” (Matt. 12:36), not just the malicious ones. I
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Matthew C. Mitchell (Resisting Gossip: Winning the War of the Wagging Tongue)
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Malicious gossip is a cancer. It must be stopped! Payback
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Matthew C. Mitchell (Resisting Gossip: Winning the War of the Wagging Tongue)
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Mel,” she said tentatively. “I’m a little worried about…” “What?” She took a breath. “Gossip. Everyone talking about us.” Mel’s eyes twinkled and she smiled. “Abby, you’re an unmarried woman pregnant with twins and you’ve been spending time with our pediatrician. He never misses a chance to sit by you at Jack’s. Surrender. The gossip is way ahead of you.” Abby gasped. She leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially. “Do they think there’s something to us? Like a relationship?” One of Mel’s light brows lifted in amusement. “They hope.” “Oh God!” “Yeah, I’ve been there,” Mel said. “The whole town had me married to Jack before I had my first really good kiss with him.” She waved a hand. “Ah, hell, go with it. At least they’re not malicious. Just very nosey. I got through it. You can, too.” Heavy
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Robyn Carr (Paradise Valley)
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What identifies gossip is the pretence that only certain people are foolish, sexual, embarrassing and prone to lose their tempers or say things they regret. The gossiper holds unfortunate specimens in their tweezers, turns them over with glee and refuses to see any connection between every new shamed or ruined personality and their own flawed nature. They withhold the truth, on which every act of compassion is based, that we are all sinners, every last one of us, not merely this or that miserable creature unlucky enough to have attracted the malicious attention of the latest hard-hearted journalist.
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The School of Life
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For generations Ashton had taken pride in its grass-roots warmth and dignity and had striven to be a good place for its children to grow up. But now there were inner turmoils, anxieties, fears, as if some kind of cancer was eating away at the town and invisibly destroying it. On the exterior, there were the store windows now replaced with unsightly plywood, the many parking meters broken off, the litter and broken glass up and down the street. But even as the store owners and businessmen swept up the debris, there seemed to be an unspoken sureness that the inner problems would remain, the troubles would continue. Crime was up, especially among the youth; simple, common trust in one’s neighbor was diminishing; never had the town been so full of rumors, scandals, and malicious gossip. In the shadow of fear and suspicion, life here was gradually losing its joy and simplicity, and no one seemed to know why or how.
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Frank E. Peretti (This Present Darkness (Darkness, #1))
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Paul at least was not hopeful that things would get better as human history moved along. He was not a believer in progress as it has been humanly understood. In what seems to have been his last letter, perhaps the very last thing he wrote, he warned Timothy that in the last days difficult times will come. “For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness although they have denied its power.” One could be forgiven for thinking that this certainly looks like now. Who does not recognize in these words the prevailing tone and texture of contemporary life….In fact this has been the end stage of every successful human society that has arisen on earth.
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Dallas Willard (Rennovation Of The Heart Putting On The Character Of Christ)
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Are these people who call themselves warriors simple and austere, or dependent on and attached to material things, living unnecessarily complicated lives? Simple lifestyles, disciplined surroundings, and a healthy existence characterized by cleanliness and organization are the traits of a warrior.
• Are they kind and generous, living for others, especially the poor, in what Buddhist teachers call accepting responsibility for being “the strength of the weak” instead of living a showy, braggart, and arrogant life?
• Are they accustomed to self-sacrifice? Do they have a fit body, do physical training, and eat a moderate and healthy diet of natural foods, as oppose to living the slovenly and poisoned lives expected of colonized beings?
• Do they benefit from some form of spiritual introspection that deepens their existence beyond the fast-paced, frenetic, and essentially meaningless modern lifestyle of the mainstream?
• Do they have self-control and self-discipline?
• Have they conquered their rage and do they engage challenges without anger but with non-violence, forbearance, and the oft-derided but very warrior-like trait of stoicism?
• Are they honest people who keep their word? Do they believe in and practice integrity and democracy and all dealings with other people?
• Are they incorruptible in public affairs and sincere in their private lives? In contrast to the hypocritical self-serving ethic of contemporary politics, do they truly serve the people?
• Do they understand and respect the power of words? Or do they tell lies, speak maliciously, use sharp or harsh words, or engage in useless gossip? Colonial beings use words to harm, destroy, and divide; warriors use words to restore harmony to situations.
• Are they moral? Or are they, like for too many of our people, abusive or prone to stealing? Does the use of drugs or alcohol caused them to lose control, leading to further abuses of their senses and a crazed or obsessively damaging sexuality?
• Are they humble? Warriors are students in search of knowledge and recognize that the world is full of teachers and mentors. Warriors seek to place themselves as humble learners in the care of learned elders and mentors, recognizing that the mentor knows more than they do. Unlike the precocious, the know-it-all , and the smart ass, the knowledge-seekers lead exemplary lives based on their growing understanding and do not hoard or profit from what they have gained on the warrior’s journey.
• Is their life-goal spiritual enlightenment and empowerment? Not money, not revenge, not prestige and status, but the cultivation of the ability to bring enlightenment and power to others, to have the capacity to bring back balance in the world and in people.
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Taiaike Alfred
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SIR OLIVER. Aye — I know — there are a set of malicious prating prudent Gossips both male and Female, who murder characters to kill time, and will rob a young Fellow of his good name before He has years to know the value of it.
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Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Delphi Complete Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 13))
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Gossip is society’s watchman, wall and whip all at once. Tale by malicious tale, rumour by rumour, the wall of society’s narrow morality is erected. Inside it is the cosy warmth of belonging. Outside, it is brutally cold and lonely.
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Manjul Bajaj (In Search of Heer)
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An intentional offense is when someone maliciously hurts you, slanders you, or gossips about you willfully. The person’s intent is to cause emotional or physical injury. Very often the offenses are verbal. James 1:19–20 admonishes us, “My beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” Don’t allow an offense against you to trigger anger or retaliation. The truth is, in nearly all cases, that willful acts of offense come back to harm the offender, not the person who is intentionally wronged.
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Don Colbert (Stress Less: Break the Power of Worry, Fear, and Other Unhealthy Habits)