Libel Quotes

“It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."

[I saw hate in a graveyard -- Stephen Fry, The Guardian, 5 June 2005]”
― Stephen Fry

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“A rumor is a social cancer: it is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many people find rumors enjoyable. That part causes the infection. And in such cases when a rumor is only partially made of truth, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the information may have gone wrong. It is passed on and on until some brave soul questions its validity; that brave soul refuses to bite the apple and let the apple eat him. Forced to start from scratch for the sake of purity and truth, that brave soul, figuratively speaking, fully amputates the information in order to protect his personal judgment. In other words, his ignorance is to be valued more than the lie believed to be true.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“What man ever openly apologizes for slander? It is not so much a feeling of slander as it is that of a massive lie, a misdeed not only to the slandered but also to those manipulated in the process. He has made them all, every one, his enemies, thereupon he is so overwhelmed with guilt that he will deny it until his grave.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it.”
― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two

“A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“Deceit for personal gain is one of history's most recurring crimes. Man's first step towards change would be thinking, counter-arguing, re-thinking, twisting, straightening, perfecting, then believing every original idea he intends to make public before making it public. There is always an angle from which an absolute truth may appear askew just as there is always a personal emotion, or a personal agenda, which alienates the ultimate good of mankind.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The crazy creatives are the creatives who never go completely mad. They aren't so easily disheartened by the seemingly endless amounts of scrutiny that creative individuals tend to receive because they, like insanity, are the ones who feed off of opposition and negative feedback and manage to continue along with a healthy ambition. It is the crazy that teaches us to use our gifts wisely and own all the attackers.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“Tale-bearers are as bad as the tale-makers.”
― Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal

“Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.”
― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two

“Sometimes you feel as though you've slandered yourself, but the joke's on them.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Wer es zulässt, dass man ihn beleidigt, verdient es.”
― Pierre Corneille

“The Christian should never have to put others down in order to feel good about himself. Instead, he can simply check out the media's insistent portrayal of Christianity and feel grateful that he isn't as deceived as the masses who really swallow the garbage. Ignorance is ultimately how people put themselves down, and the mere Christian who knows what entails the mere Christian is ultimately free from such.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“In a landmark ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice--that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism. But in the South it generated even more contempt for the national press, and that animosity has lingered beyond the Civil Rights Era.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Spread joy and laughter, not hate and rumors.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“While it might make a noble standing stable, a label stands a lie away from libel.”
― Criss Jami

“People who have never sued anyone or been sued have missed a narcissistic pleasure that is not quite like any other.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

“Dispel the lips of Gossip with a sip of the Gospel.”
― Criss Jami

“What looks to be the cleanest political party, for a period, will often prove to be the filthiest in the end. Just like any form of corruption, this one plays dirty. It drags its enemies through the mud and scrubs itself clean before morning. It throws rocks and hides its hands. It gains power by all methods but the Truth: on the one hand, by pandering, flattery, and appeasement (quite like Satan, 'the father of lies'); and on the other, by deception and ruthlessness, constantly slinging accusations and smearing its opponents - posing as an angel of light (quite like Satan, 'the accuser') - and doing it hypocritically. It projects, gaslights, intimidates, manipulates, and confuses its subjects into adopting the narrative that it is the intellectually and morally superior party. Believing itself the greater good, and the ends justifying the means, it is able to persist in these things and sleep well doing them. Therefore in the rags of politics, because of this party, it is often the case that individuals painted as villains by the media are heroes in reality.”
― Criss Jami

“There's this word Libel that people love to pass around when filing lawsuits against someone who accurately described them in a publication. It does not scare me because I know that the story terrifies them enough to stick to the compromise that I called it fiction”
― Niedria Kenny, Order in the Courtroom: The Tale of a Texas Poker Player

“Love is boss when everything you hear about a person is filtered through their enemies, yet you still choose to love them.”
― Criss Jami

“It is certainly the case that if you are often reviewed, you will find yourself repeatedly blamed and praised for saying what you never said, and for not saying what you have said.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Art of Writing and the Gifts of Writers

“The compensation question was where they had to deliberate the most. “Probably took three or four hours to just settle on a number,” Tom said. Some of the jurors wanted to give Johnny more, and others wanted to give him less. “Some people felt sorry that she probably wouldn’t have enough to pay him. Others said he probably won’t make her pay it all anyways. So let’s just make it what we think it should be, and not based on pity, right? We settled in the middle.”
In terms of the one defamatory Adam Waldman statement awarded to Amber, in which he called her abuse allegations a “hoax,” Tom said they understood it was a contradictory verdict. “We talked about that a lot. We looked at the time that he made those statements versus after the fact knowing everything.” Tom said they thought Adam making those statements at that time, without true knowledge or evidence of a hoax, was defamatory.”
― Kelly Loudenberg, Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine

“I take what Jennifer Lee reported (in her 1991 memoir) with a grain of salt.”
― Cecil Brown, Pryor Lives!: How Richard Pryor Became Richard Pryor Or Kiss My Rich, Happy Black...Ass! A Memoir

“Tickler: I hate novelties. Is the prosecution mania about to subside, think you? Now-a-days, every word is said to be actionable. You cannot open your mouth, or put pen to paper, without feeing a libel-lawyer. An Edinburgh Whig, and really some of the London ones seem no better, is an animal without a skin. [The Whigs] have entered into a cowardly compact to prosecute every syllable that shall ever be written against any one of their degraded and slanderous selves.”
― John Wilson, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 63: 1822-04

“All slander, and most gossip, are cancerous to truth - not just because of the way they spread - but because of the uncontrollable growth they amass around a person's true character; and while this obvious parallel is perhaps known by most, only few care, as evidenced by their prevalence in everyday life.”
― Criss Jami

“Slander does to a soul what cancer does to a cell.”
― Criss Jami