Gossip can estrange the closest friends.

Eleanor said:
Many people will walk in and out of you life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.
Jay said:
…the others leave them on your back.

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

To be ignorant and simple now – not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground – would be to throw down our weapons, and betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory p. 50