Source: A Walk to Remember
“Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
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)
“Gossips are only sociologists upon a mean and petty scale.”
On Being Human http://books.google.com/books?id=hp0RAAAAMAAJ&q="Gossips+are+only+sociologists+upon+a+mean+and+petty+scale"&pg=PA326#v=onepage, The Atlantic Monthly, (September, 1897)
1920s and later
“The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.”
As quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958) by Herbert Victor Prochnow, p. 190
As quoted in ...
Variant: The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.
“no one ever gossips about the virtues of others”
1920s
Variant: No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
Source: On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 2: The Aims of Education, p. 50
Context: The instinctive foundation of the intellectual life is curiosity, which is found among animals in its elementary forms. Intelligence demands an alert curiosity, but it must be of a certain kind. The sort that leads village neighbours to try to peer through curtains after dark has no very high value. The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices. Accordingly most gossip is untrue, but care is taken not to verify it. Our neighbour's sins, like the consolations of religion, are so agreeable that we do not stop to scrutinise the evidence closely.
Quoted in Gert Jonkers, "Gore Vidal, the Fantastic Man," Butt, No. 20 (7 April 2007)
2000s
“Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.”
Variant: Gossip is what no one claims to like – but everybody enjoys.
