Byron Dorgan Quotes

Weasel Words

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words - and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum.

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

Bush is good at stating the obviously untrue.

Fair and balanced is doublespeak for bite-out-chunks-of-truth until only irrelevancy is left, byte-sized, entertaining irrelevancy

It’s better to be quotable than to be honest.

Politicians learn to turn the truth into something that they want the truth to be.

They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them for their blindness.

The connection between humbug and politics is too long established to be challenged.

Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.

This is Capitol Hill where they never let facts get in the way of a good press release.

That product of the human intelligence which we denominate the Campaign Lie, though it did not originate in the United States, has here attained a development unknown in other lands. It is the destiny of America to try all experiments and exhaust all follies. In the short space of seventy-seven years, we have exhausted the efficiency of falsehood uttered to keep a man out of office.

The reality often times does not match the rhetoric. The rhetoric is very easy if you keep the reality secret.

… politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia

There is a lot of spinning and a lot of lying in our times—in politics, in government, in sports and everywhere. It’s gotten to the point where … you no longer believe the first version of anything. It wasn’t always that way. I guess it started for me with Vietnam, when the establishment felt it had to lie to justify a policy that as it turned out was never going to work.

Do not be deceived by the way men of bad faith misuse words and names…. Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade.

Hypocrisy and rhetorical flimflam are standard in politics …

Politics has become beyond acceptable when it comes to humanity. People are just frozen in falsehood.

There's something outrageously funny about the bold-faced lying that's going on, in a general way. Just the blatant denial of facts, whether it's climate change or crowd sizes. Every day, there's another blatant lie. I think there's comedy in there somewhere.

Ambiguity is a big part of this post-truth world we're living in.