Rumours - Quotes

A plausible rumour seems a lot more believable than the truth itself. - Kobe Abe

A rumour goes in one ear and out many mouths. - Chinese Proverb

A rumor – always efficacious in semiliterate societies. - Arthur F. Wright

A rumor always contains information of considerable interest. The teller is therefore the center of attention; and the listener, by his eagerness, magnifies the teller's feelings of importance. - H. G. Barnett

A rumor is one thing that gets thicker instead of thinner as it is spread. - Richard Armour

A rumor is a process of information processing as well as a process of interpretation and annotation. A rumor is a collective act to give unexplained facts a sense or meaning. - Mark Schindler

A rumor is like a check – never endorse it till you're sure it's genuine. - G. Kleiser

A rumor is like a snowball: It starts small, but it can pick up mass and momentum as it rolls down the hill until what began in a hushed tone ends with the roar of an avalanche. - Robert Menschel

A rumour without a leg to stand on will get around some other way. - John Tudor

Great rumors never die. Their flame flickers low for a while, like an inactive volcano, to reawaken another day. - Jean-Noel Kapferer

Malicious rumours can spread confusion. A careless remark can be as a cigarette butt casually tossed into the dumpster, smouldering until it bursts into flame and engulfs a neighborhood. - Margaret Atwood

Most rumors aren't true; but that's what makes them interesting. - Jerry Dampier

Never make negative comments or spread rumours about anyone. It depreciates their reputation and yours. - Brian Koslow

Old rumors never die; nor do they fade away. They simply lay dormant for a while until the next appropriate time appears. - Terry Ann Knopf

Our true friends will know a rumor isn't true, and our enemies will revel in the deceit. - Elizabeth Owens

People who spread rumors are like walking infections. The lying words from their mouths spread like disease from person to person. The only way to stop the disease is to keep your mouth shut. - Joyce Hansen

Rumours are carried by haters, spread by fools, and accepted by idiots. - Unknown  

Rumors are compelling to the extent that they circulate in ways that can position their hearers and tellers in new and unexpected relation to what lies beyond them. To hear or relate a rumor is to pass on the possibility of something having happened or yet to happen and thereby claim for oneself a place within the circuit on which rumor travels. And by staking for oneself a position from which to imagine the potential occurrence of events (that is, events as they could have been or might be), one begins to share in the circulation of potentiality itself. - Vicente L. Rafael

Rumors are found wherever circumstances are ambiguous, issues are important, and critical ability is low. - Gary Alan Fine & Bill Ellis

Rumors are hearsay; they are told, believed, and passed on not because of the weight of evidence but because of the expectations by tellers that they are true in the first place. - Erich Goode & Nachman Ben-Yehuda

Rumors are like a disease epidemic.... Once they escape, they spread from person to person, often with deadly effect. Better to take simple initial precautions than be forced into eradication measures at a later date. - Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

Rumors are like a flame blown by the wind. - Nellie Mae Batson

Rumors are like a snowball rolling down a mountain ... as it rolls it picks up speed and more and more snow. Soon it creates an avalanche destroying people or places and then there is no going back. - Freddy S. Zalta

Rumors are like being stabbed in the back. You're injured before you know what's happening. And while the knife might be pulled out later, it's going to leave a permanent scar. - Joe White

Rumors are like bushfires: It takes an errant spark to set them off but a couple of hundred firemen with fire-retardant helicopters to put them out. - Peter Lefcourt

Rumors are like homeless orphans hunting for shelter. They adapt themselves to fit any promising circumstance. - Stephen J. Cannell

Rumors are like lightning on summer tinder, producing flames that dance in flickering brilliance from person to person, sometimes flaring in great conflagrations of exaggeration before finally extinguishing themselves in the cold waters of fact. - Stephen Leigh

Rumors are like matter. They can't be destroyed. - John C. Mowen

Rumors are like mushrooms; they grow best in the dark. - Diane Hudson & Jan Simon

Rumors are like odors: the more pungent they are, the faster they spread. - Yun Ch’oe

Rumors are like wildfire; you are burned up before you know it. - Kenneth D. Mcllroy

Rumors are like wind in the belly – all noise and no nourishment. - Unknown

Rumors are not news; but they sometimes foreshadow news. - Ernest Hamlin Abbott

Rumors are often recycled. People rely on those narrative templates that have proved to be plausible and durable in the past. Rumors appear, are spread, and then disappear – ignored – until similar circumstances make the stories appropriate once again. - Gary Alan Fine & Bill Ellis

Rumors are seen as crimes committed by third parties. They are perfect crimes and leave not the slightest trace and require no weapons whatsoever – the defense is left without a leg to stand on. - Jean-Noel Kapferer

Rumors are the oldest form of mass media. - Jean-Noel Kapferer

Rumors are transmitted because they are surprising, funny, or shocking, and the teller wishes to entertain the listeners. Similar to the telling of a joke, the passing of a rumor provides entertainment and prestige. That is why urban legends last so long: they are savoured at the end of a meal, or in a bar while sipping on an after-dinner drink; they provide a certain momentary pleasure in consuming. - Gail de Vos

Rumors can shape the public opinion of a society by affecting and coordinating the individual beliefs of its members. - Zheng You Xia & LaiLei Huang

Rumors have wings. - Aeschylus

Rumors may appear to be random and sometimes malicious accounts of ongoing situations. Yet they serve an extremely important function. Rumors are a means of transmitting critical information about the nature of the disaster situation within the affected population. This information may be simplistic, incomplete, and even incorrect. Nevertheless, it gives disaster victims some guidance and structure in a highly unusual, uncertain situation. - Saundra K. Schneider

Rumours generally grow deformed as they travel. - Edward Counsel

Some people and some groups are predisposed to accept certain rumors, because those rumors are compatible with their self-interest, or with what they think they know to be true. - Cass R. Sunstein

Some rumors are entirely true. Others contain grains of truth; still others contain none at all. Plausible or implausible, truthful or false, rumors circulate because people are trying to get to the bottom of a matter. The acceptance or rejection of a given rumor in a given time or place depends on its ability to satisfy this need to understand. - Ksenija Bilbija

The attempt to control a rumor is like trying to package fog. - Allan J. Kimmel

The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it. - Stefan Zweig

There exists no strict line between a rumor and information. The dividing line between information and a rumor is subjective and the result of one's own belief. People call something information when they consider it true and call it a rumor when they consider it false. - Mark Schindler

Those who feed on rumors are small, suspicious souls. - Charles R. Swindoll

Trying to dispel a rumor is like trying to unspread butter. - Lloyd Cary

Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell. - Croft M Pentz

Where the public wants to understand but does not receive any official answers, there are rumors. Rumors are the black market of information. - Mark Schindler

You know what rumors are like – like a jar full of moths. Once they escape, they're all over the place. - Rhys Bowen