This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Next to the slanderer, we detest the bearer of the slander to our ears." - Mary Hartwell Catherwood
"As ye speak no slander, so listen to none, for if it had no hearers, it would have no bearers." - Eliezer ben Joel HaLevi
"Slander is perhaps the only vice which no circumstance can palliate, as well as being one which we are most ingenious in concealing form ourselves." - Jean Baptiste Massillon
"No one is safe from slander. The best way is to pay no attention to it, but live in innocence and let the world talk." - Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin NULL
"There is no protection against slander." - Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin NULL
"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." - Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL
"What indulgence does the world extend to those evil-speakers who, under the mask of friendship, stab indiscriminately with the keen, though rusty blade of slander!" - Madame Roland, Jeanne Manon Philon, born Marie-Jeanne Phlipon
"Malicious slander never would have leisure to search, with prying eyes, for faults abroad, if all, like me, consider’d their own hearts, and wept the sorrows which they found at home." - Nicolas Rowe
"The worthiest people are the most injured by slander, as we usually find that to be the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at. A little, and a little, collected together become a great deal; the heap in the barn consists of single grains, and drop and drop from an inundation." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
"Slander is a very gross evil; it implies two who do wrong, and one who is doubly wronged." - Artabanus the Hyrcanian or Artabanus of Persia NULL
"Slander is called the third tongue because it slays three persons, the speaker, the spoken to, and the spoken of." - Babylonian Talmud
"The way to check slander is to despise it; attempt to overtake and refute it, and it will outrun you." - Alexandre Dumas, born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie
"There is a broad distinction between character and reputation, for one may be destroyed by slander, while the other can never be harmed, save by its possessor. Reputation is in no man's keeping. You and I cannot determine what other men shall think and say about us. We can only determine what they ought to think of us and say about us." - Jack Holland
"Whoever listens to slander is himself a slanderer." - Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, simply known as Ali NULL
"Slander is the solace of malignity." - Joseph Joubert
"What is slander? A verdict of “guilty” pronounced in the absence of the accused, with closed doors, without defense or appeal, by an interested and prejudiced judge." - Joseph Roux
"Whole surfaces are carried away even from a mountain when undermined by a gentle flow of water; how much more the soft hearts of men by clever persons who attack them with slander!" - Panchatantra or The Panchatantra NULL
"Slander is a poison which extinguishes charity, both in the slanderer and in the person who listens to it; so that a single calumny may prove fatal to an infinite number of souls; since it kills not only those who circulate it, but also all those who do not reject it." - Saint Bernard of Clairvaux NULL
"Slander is compared to an arrow because it kills at a distance." - Midrash or The Midrash NULL
"Slander meets no regard from noble minds; only the base believe what they base only utter." - Thomas Beller
"A generous confession disarms slander." - Thomas Fuller
"Slander, in the strict meaning of the term, comes under the head of lying; but it is a kind of lying which, like its antithesis flattery, ought to be set apart for special censure." - Washington Gladden
"Slander lives upon recession, forever housed where it gets possession." - William Shakespeare
"Gossip … has caused infinitely more sorrow in life than murder. It is drunkenness of the tongue; it is assassination of reputations. It runs the cowardly gamut from mere ignorant, impertinent intrusion into the lives of others to malicious slander ... He who listens to this crime of respectability without protest is as evil as he who speaks. One strong, manly voice of protest, of appeal to justice, of calling halt in the name of charity—could fumigate a room from gossip as a clear, sharp winter wind kills a pestilence." - William George Jordan
"Let yourself be persecuted, but do not persecute others. Be crucified, but do not crucify others. Be slandered, but do not slander others." - Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
"A slander is like a hornet; if you cannot kill it dad the first blow, better not strike at it. " - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"It takes your enemy and your friend, working together to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
"By now many intellectuals regard theoretical or 'objective' knowledge as the only knowledge worth considering. Popper himself encourages the belief by his slander of relativism. Now this conceit would have substance if scientists and philosophers looking for universal and objective morality had succeeded in finding the former and persuaded, rather than forced, dissenting cultures to adopt the latter. This is not the case." - Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
"When a man is laboring under the pain of any distemper, it is then that he recollects there are gods, and that he himself is but a man; no mortal is then the object of his envy, his admiration, or his contempt, and having no malice to gratify, the tales of slander excite not his attention." - Pliny the Younger, full name Casus Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo NULL
"How canst thou escape sin? Think of three things: whence thou comest, whither thou goest, and before whom thou must appear. The scoffer, the liar, the hypocrite, and the slanderer can have no share in the future world of bliss. To slander is to commit murder." - Rabbinical Proverbs
"I can reveal to you that I wished to die - For with much weeping she left me Saying: "Sappho - what suffering is ours! For it is against my will that I leave you." In answer, I said: "Go, happily remembering me For you know what we shared and pursued - If not, I wish you to see again our [former joys]... The many braids of rose and violet you [wreathed] Around yourself at my side And the many garlands of flowers With which you adorned your soft neck: With royal oils from [fresh flowers] You anointed [ yourself ] And on soft beds fulfilled your longing [For me] " - Sappho NULL
"And He wishes all of us to be saved through Him and receive Him with our heart pure and our body chaste." - Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL
"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." - Saint Paul, aka The Apostle Paul, Paul the Apostle or Saul of Tarsus NULL
"It is a fact that people are always well aware of what is due them. Unfortunately, they remain oblivious of what they owe to others." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL
"From the greatest to the smallest, happiness and usefulness are largely found in the same soul, and the joy of life is won in its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not shirked life's burdens." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!" - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"War is not merely justifiable, but imperative upon honorable men, upon an honorable nation, where peace can only be obtained by the sacrifice of conscientious conviction or of national welfare." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"Before tackling abuse, we must know if we can destroy its foundations." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"All afflictions are based on selfishness. That's why we have so much anger and so many afflictions." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
"If you tickle the earth with a hoe she laughs with a harvest." - Douglas William Jerrold
"Soldiers looked at as they ought to be. They are to the world as poppies to corn-fields." - Douglas William Jerrold
"We are not told of things that happened to specific people exactly as they happened; but the beginning is when there are good things and bad things, things that happen in this life which one never tires of seeing and hearing about, things which one cannot bear not to tell of and must pass on for all generations. If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader’s attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things. Good things and bad things alike, they are things of this world and no other. Writers in other countries approach the matter differently. Old stories in our own are different from new. There are differences in the degree of seriousness. But to dismiss them as lies is itself to depart from the truth. Even in the writ which the Buddha drew from his noble heart are parables, devices for pointing obliquely at the truth. To the ignorant they may seem to operate at cross purposes. The Greater Vehicle is full of them, but the general burden is always the same. The difference between enlightenment and confusion is of about the same order as the difference between the good and the bad in a romance. If one takes the generous view, then nothing is empty and useless." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki