He who unveils rumors enjoys greater prestige than a simple public entertainer.

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.

Rumors explain the unknown or the poorly understood, creating comprehensible narratives. They make sense out of ambiguous events. Sometimes even those who are the subject of rumors are tempted to believe or at least repeat them because they throw a more positive light on events than the personal version would do.

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

Rumors are not located within one person or even one "group" but are traces of the movement itself of social knowledge. Rumors generate mobile boundaries of self, the social matrix, and social knowledge. For when we say that knowledge is implicit in social relations, we are often talking about the effects of rumors. Telling, talking, and listening all become productive sites, not reflections, of powers. Rumors interrupt and maintain the flows of everyday banter. They create images of the social world and generate movement of discourse.

Rumors are found wherever circumstances are ambiguous, issues are important, and critical ability is low.

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.

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.

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.

Rumors are like the leaves in fall, an attention getting brief entrance but they are destined to rot on the ground.

Rumors can shape the public opinion of a society by affecting and coordinating the individual beliefs of its members.

Rumors are like songs ... There always has to be a bit of truth in them, or they won't have any power.

Rumors are like the thistles that the devil and his servants sow in our fields, they stand there, and the better the soil is the bigger they grow, and they blossom and go to seed, and when the top is ripe, then comes the wind--no man knows whence it cometh or whither it goeth--and it carries the down from the thistle-top all over the field, and next year the whole field is full of them, and men stand there and scold, but no one will take hold and pull up the weeds, for fear of getting his fingers pricked.

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.

The stuff that rumors are made of thickens: The masses that are the true owners and carriers of the rumor step out of their anonymous silence and speak out.

Rumors are like soap bubbles. They can be produced en masse by a little bamboo tube, and thus cannot be effectively refuted one by one.

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.

Rumors are like odors: the more pungent they are, the faster they spread.

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

False rumors are like mistresses: more exciting initially than wives, but more deadly.

Rumors are like mushrooms; they grow best in the dark.

Rumors are like matter. They can't be destroyed.

Rumors are like a big onion--when peeled, all layers, all tears, and nothing there.

Rumors are like abstract art or graffiti--they give you the mood of a place. They give you an emotional background.

Rumors are like harpoons--once they go in, they're hard to pull out.

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.

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

Rumors are like the things that happen to us in sleep. It is almost impossible to think of them rationally; and almost impossible to think of anything else.

The attempt to control a rumor is like trying to package fog.

Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell.

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.

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

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