“It would have been funny if I had been an observer and not a participant, an idea that gave me a disconcerting insight into gossip. As I talked beside the silent Tamara, I realized that despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt.”

Source: A Walk to Remember

Source: Queen of Babble in the Big City

Citas, Candide (1759)

Source: LSD : My Problem Child (1980), Ch. 1 : How LSD Originated
Context: This self-experiment showed that LSD-25 behaved as a psychoactive substance with extraordinary properties and potency. There was to my knowledge no other known substance that evoked such profound psychic effects in such extremely low doses, that caused such dramatic changes in human consciousness and our experience of the inner and outer world.
What seemed even more significant was that I could remember the experience of LSD inebriation in every detail. This could only mean that the conscious recording function was not interrupted, even in the climax of the LSD experience, despite the profound breakdown of the normal world view. For the entire duration of the experiment, I had even been aware of participating in an experiment, but despite this recognition of my condition, I could not, with every exertion of my will, shake off the LSD world. Everything was experienced as completely real, as alarming reality; alarming, because the picture of the other, familiar everyday reality was still fully preserved in the memory for comparison.
Another surprising aspect of LSD was its ability to produce such a far-reaching, powerful state of inebriation without leaving a hangover. Quite the contrary, on the day after the LSD experiment I felt myself to be, as already described, in excellent physical and mental condition.
I was aware that LSD, a new active compound with such properties, would have to be of use in pharmacology, in neurology, and especially in psychiatry, and that it would attract the interest of concerned specialists. But at that time I had no inkling that the new substance would also come to be used beyond medical science, as an inebriant in the drug scene. Since my self-experiment had revealed LSD in its terrifying, demonic aspect, the last thing I could have expected was that this substance could ever find application as anything approaching a pleasure drug.

Quoted in Gert Jonkers, "Gore Vidal, the Fantastic Man," Butt, No. 20 (7 April 2007)
2000s

Source: School's Out—Forever

Speech at a May Day rally in London (4 May 1969), quoted in The Times (5 May 1969), p. 1. There had been a series of reports that Wilson's leadership might be challenged.
Prime Minister

On Live Earth (Variety Interview, 7/16/2007)

Cecil Graham http://books.google.com/books?id=8SzYgCNz-vwC&q="Gossip+is+charming+History+is+merely+gossip+But+scandal+is+gossip+made+tedious+by+morality"&pg=PT52#v=onepage, Act III
Variant: Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Source: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)