Top 22 Quotes & Sayings by Bergen Evans

Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.

Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning, and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.

Speech is highly elliptical. It would scarcely be endurable otherwise. Ellipsis is indispensable to the writer or speaker who wants to be brief and pithy, but it can easily cause confusion and obscurity and must be used with skill.

For the most part our leaders are merely following out in front; they do but marshal us the way that we are going.

Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than by the able, and those who scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own inner torments.

The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all.

That is the essence of a witch-hunt, that any questioning of the evidence or the procedures in itself constitutes proof of complicity.

Legislators who are of even average intelligence stand out among their colleagues. . . . A cultured college president has become as much a rarity as a literate newspaper publisher. A financier interested in economics is as exceptional as a labor leader interested in the labor movement. For the most part our leaders are merely following out in front; they [only] marshal us in the way that we are going.

Authors are magpies, echoing each other's words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters.

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical. . . . Any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.

Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom.

An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis.

We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis.

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

Words are one of our chief means of adjusting to all the situations of life. The better control we have over words, the more successful our adjustment is likely to be.

It (the dash ) is a comfortable punctuation mark since even the most rigorous critic can seldom claim that any particular example of it is a misuse. Its overuse is its greatest danger, and the writer who can't resist dashes may be suspected of uncoordinated thinking.

There is no necessary connection between the desire to lead and the ability to lead, and even less the ability to lead somewhere that will be to the advantage of the led.

Many studies have established the fact that there is a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence and that the ability to increase one's vocabulary throughout life is a sure reflection of intellectual progress.

There is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.

Most civilized lives are measured out with coffee spoons.