Life & Wisdom Quote by Frank Howard Clark

Gossip gets a moral makeover here: it is condemned not for lying, but for circulating the wrong kind of truth. Frank Howard Clark flips the usual defense of chatter (at least its accurate) into a sharper accusation. The line works because it refuses the comforting binary where truth equals virtue and falsehood equals harm. In his framing, accuracy can be weaponry. A fact can land like a punch if it is delivered with the wrong motive, at the wrong volume, to the wrong audience.

The subtext is about power and proximity. Gossip is social currency; it buys inclusion, leverage, entertainment. Clark suggests that what makes it “evil” is the transactional impulse behind it: truth repurposed as spectacle. The second clause tightens the screws. “Shouldn’t be passed around” implies an ethics of containment, an older-fashioned belief that discretion is a form of respect. Not everything that is knowable is meant to be communal property.

Contextually, the quote sits comfortably in a mid-century sensibility that prized manners, privacy, and reputation as real social infrastructure. But it also reads as surprisingly contemporary in an age where sharing is frictionless and virtue is often measured by “exposing” something. Clark anticipates the modern dilemma: transparency is not automatically justice. Sometimes it’s just voyeurism with better branding, turning private pain into public content and calling it accountability. The most unsettling point is also the most useful: harm doesn’t require fabrication, only distribution.