Lee H. Hamilton Quotes

It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.

I've learned to mumble with great incoherence.

I labor to be brief, and manage to be obscure.

The politician is ... trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded, because if they have a cutting edge, they may later return to wound him.

We find few disputes, that are not founded on some ambiguity in the expression [thereof].

We hope vaguely, we dread precisely; our fears are infinitely more precise than our hopes

He who wars, walks in a mist, through which the keenest eyes cannot always discern the right path.

You should not make specific pledges either to the Senate or to the People. Stick to vague generalities.

Any order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood

I'm congenitally vague.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

I'm not sure I necessarily have explicit messages.

When you fail to communicate, there are gray areas. And when there's gray areas, then bad things happen.

That's the one thing I don't like hearing, when someone says, 'We'll see what happens, see what happens here, see what happens there.' Forget all of that.

I'd rather not ever make anything overly simple just because I'm scared people won't get it.

Everybody wants to have an empirical analysis of a relationship ending, but sometimes there's not that much clarity, and that's OK.

Probably" is a word with an emergency ejector seat.

It is... easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.

That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.

A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy. However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.

A lot of people don't know what they want, you know, or they're just kind of vague about it.

...I am much better now at ambiguities.

By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

Yeah. I mean, acknowledging is easy. Something happened or it didn't. But understanding... that's where things get sticky.