Prevarication Quotes

• Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.

  Norman Mailer

  Honesty, Habit, Sturdy

  Norman Mailer (2007). “The Castle in the Forest”

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• Prevarication, how divine! I always did get along better with sinners.

  Karen Chance

  Divine, Sinner

  Karen Chance (2011). “Cassie Palmer Novels 1-5”, p.652, Penguin

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• We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.

  Primo Levi

  Skills, Luck, Faces

  "The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991". Book by Eric J. Hobsbawm, 1994.

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• Men who marry for gratification, propagation or the matter of buttons or socks, must expect to cope with and deal in a certain amount of quibble, subterfuge, concealments, and double, deep-dyed prevarication.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Men, Buttons, Matter

  Elbert Hubbard, Bert Hubbard (1923). “Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work”

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• Whoever considers the number of absurd and ridiculous oaths necessary to be taken at present in most countries, on being admitted into any society or profession whatever, will be less surprised to find prevarication still prevailing, where perjury has led the way.

  Guillaume Thomas Francois Raynal

  Country, Taken, Numbers

  Guillaume Thomas François RAYNAL, John Obadiah JUSTAMOND (1783). “A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies. Translated ... by J. Justamond, M. A. The third edition: revised and corrected. With maps adapted to the work and a copious index”, p.349

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• The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.

  George Eliot

  Lying, Eye, Artist

  George Eliot (1869). “Silas Marner and Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.73

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• Killing for pleasure is wrong and should be banned. Fox hunting, stag hunting and hare coursing are moral issues. It is time that we stood up for morality. The commandment Thou shall not kill may be hedged with exceptions.Thou shall not kill for pleasure is not; it is a commandment for the 21st century and it is time that we respected it unambiguously, without prevarication and without procrastination.

  Lyndon Harrison, Baron Harrison

  Procrastination, Hunting, Issues

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• Failure to summon forth the courage to risk a nondogmatic and nonevasive stance on such crucial existential matters can also blur our ethical vision. If our actions in the world are to stem from an encounter with what is central in life, they must be unclouded by either dogma or prevarication. Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Empathy, Risk, Vision

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• Because I withered under the glare of an actual invitation, I was a firm believer in preventive prevarication--in other words, lying early in order to free myself later on.

  Rachel Cohn

  Lying, Order, Glare

  Rachel Cohn, David Levithan (2010). “Dash & Lily's Book of Dares”, p.17, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• The need to speak the truth and even to seek it for oneself is only conceivable in so far as the individual thinks and acts as one of a society, and not of any society (for it is just the constraining relations between superior and inferior that often drive the latter to prevarication) but of a society founded on reciprocity and mutual respect, and therefore on cooperation.

  Jean Piaget

  Thinking, Needs, Cooperation

  Jean Piaget (1997). “The Moral Judgement of the Child”, p.164, Simon and Schuster

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• I first studied to be a preacher, but decided that I was too prone to tell big stories. Then I studied Blackstone for a while and soon learned that I was not adept enough at prevarication to make a successful lawyer. I then made up my mind that I would seek some field where I could tell big stories and tell the truth.

  Isaac Cline

  Successful, Mind, Stories

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