Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Scott

Scott’s line has the sigh of someone who’s watched “truth” lose every election it ever ran against social desire. “Ah, well” isn’t just a throat-clearing; it’s resignation. The speaker isn’t denying the existence of truth so much as admitting its irrelevance once a community begins doing what communities do best: sorting itself through stories.

The neat pivot - truth is “always one thing,” but “in a way it’s the other thing” - captures Scott’s central obsession: how empires, households, and bureaucracies survive by managing appearances rather than confronting facts. Gossip, here, isn’t trivial chatter; it’s a social instrument, a low-tech intelligence network. It travels faster than official channels, punishes deviations, rewards conformity, and translates complex events into moral shorthand. That’s why it “counts.” Not because it’s accurate, but because it’s diagnostic.

“It shows where people’s hearts lie” is the kicker: gossip becomes an emotional census. What gets repeated, embellished, or quietly buried tells you who the community protects, who it resents, who it’s eager to see fall. Scott, writing in the long shadow of British India and its class-bound anxieties, understood that power rarely needs to shout; it whispers, it insinuates, it lets reputations do the dirty work. In that sense the line isn’t a defense of gossip so much as a bleak report from the field: if you want to know what people believe, don’t read the proclamations. Listen to what they can’t stop saying.