"Backbite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some years after Lord Grey's death, he gives his mature, and then at any rate, disinterested approbation of Lord Grey's administration, and his opinion of the causes of its failure. He kindles into indignation when "most untruely and maliciously, those evil tongues backbite and slander the sacred ashes of that most just and honourable personage, whose least virtue, of many most excellent, which abounded in his heroical spirit, they were never able ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... sure; it is that of the race," she makes an intellectual somersault from the twelfth century into the nineteenth, and never gets back firmly on her pagan feet again. As Brandes wittily observes: "People who talk like that do not torture their enemy to death; they backbite him." ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of the Ning mansion were many in number, and their opinions of a mixed kind; and that whole bevy of servants, devoid as they were of all sense of right, solely excelled in the practice of inventing stories to backbite their masters; and this is how some mean person or other again, who it was is not known, insinuated slanderous and opprobrious reports (against Chia Se). Chia Chen had, presumably, also come to hear some unfavourable ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... present, down to the most humble lay Sister; but they were under great obligations to her mother, and their abbess was her father's sister. There were few other women except the old crones from the hospitals and nurseries, who were never absent when there was an opportunity to weep or to backbite. In going through the nave of the church into the chapel the sisters had passed a group of younger lads and maidens, who had nudged one another in so disrespectful a way, whispering all sorts of things, that Els had tried to draw Eva past them as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... neighbor's good name, as if it were the veriest toy in the world? Do not many having a form of godliness (some of them demurely, others confidently, both without any sense of, or remorse for, what they do) backbite their brethren? Is it not grown so common a thing to asperse causelessly that no man wonders at it, that few dislike, that scarce any detest it? that most notorious calumniators are heard, not only with patience, but with pleasure; yea, are even held in vogue and reverence ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... chawin' around about the Lorrigans, Scotty. Don't think I ain't heard it. Maybe it's your religion to backbite yore neighbors and say what you wouldn't dare to say to their face with a gun on you so we'd be equal. I've passed it up. I've considered the source and let it go. But when you come belly-achin' around about me stealin' a ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower |
