Equivocation Quotes

I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse.. I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.

Whereas, according to the declaration of that true man of the world Talleyrand, the use of language is to conceal the thoughts; this is to declare in the present instance, when I say I am not able to bear much talking, it means really, and without any mistake, or equivocation, or oblique meaning, or implication, or subterfuge, or omission, that I am not able; being at present rather weak in the head, and able to work no more.

You can't always see both sides of the story. Eventually, you have to pick a side and stick with it. No more equivocating. You have to commit.

Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.

It could not, in the opinion of His Majesty's Government, be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.

You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.

That's a good question. Let me try to evade you.

Probably." "Again with the probablys." "A world full of probablys," she said.

The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter.

You may be right,' she said, a phrase which here meant 'I’m wrong, but I don’t have the courage to say so.

The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.

There are folks who will equivocate. They'll say, 'You know, I'm not a scientist.' Well, I'm not either. But the best scientists in the world know that climate change is happening.

At the moment, I'm certainly not thinking 'never again', but neither am I thinking 'I can't wait to play that part again'. I'm somewhere in between.

That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude.

Wishy-washy equivocations - and not just on abortion, but on immigration, on civil rights, on income inequality - weaken all of us.

If you temporize, you are lost.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

I didn't say I was running, did I?

I had this habit of an academic of answering the question. I should have fobbed it off.

Weasel Words

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.

I've waffled before. I'll waffle again.

I know it was more than that. But it was also less than that, too.

I cannot say that I don't disagree with you.