Bergen Evans Quotations

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

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.

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.

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.

Most civilized lives are measured out with coffee spoons.

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

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

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

An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis.

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