He talks nothing but equivocation and mental reservation, and mightily affects to give a word a double stroke, like a tennis-ball against two walls at one blow, to defeat the expectation of his antagonist.
The equivocation favoured by such language at once begins to appear.
I pull in resolution and begin To doubt the equivocation of the fiend That lies like truth.
I replied clearly and without equivocation that Le-Jay never spoke to me of the fifteen louis, neither did he give them to me.
The equivocation was ingenious: but whether the difference between the sin of such an equivocation and the sin of a lie be worth any expense of ingenuity may perhaps be doubted.
It is but fair that, in reading the narrative of times when many lives hung on successful disguise and concealment, we should remember that the modern sense of equivocation was then unknown.
Also he did exclude all equivocation so far forth, that if he did in any sort equivocate in this protestation, he did yield himself as guilty of the whole both in the sight of God and men.
Had he a single fact which belongs to me personally or by profession to couple my name with equivocation in 1843?
Then why do you show such suspicion of a Catholic theologian, who speaks of certain extraordinary cases in which an equivocation in a penitent cannot be visited by his confessor as if it were a sin?
Another mode of verbal misleading is equivocation or a play upon words; and it is defended on the theory that to lie is to use words in a sense which they will not bear.
But even here, before we admit the existence of any such contradiction, we must be careful to ascertain, that there is no equivocation in play, that two different subjects are not confounded under one and the same word.
The equivocationlies in the construction of the Latin tongue, which cannot be rendered in English.
Equivocation cannot be had recourse to in matters of Contract, nor for pecuniary gain, nor sordid profit.
The question of Equivocation is not a question of Protestant versus Catholic, but of Wise Noddle versus Foolish Noddle.
You are quite correct in saying that the doctrine of Equivocation is the justification of stratagems in war, and of a great many other recognised modes of conduct.
There was variation and equivocation in his successive audiences; there was delay and doubt on the part of the Inquisition, and the trial dragged on.
Hence, any who practised equivocation were, so far, unfaithful to the Society.
Ambiguity always falls within a field or direction of conduct, and though it may extend much further, and must extend some further than the point at which equivocation occurs, yet it is never ubiquitous.
There need be no mystery as to how such equivocation arises.
We repeat it, this equivocation has become exceedingly general, and its only result has been uselessly to fatigue inquiring minds or to drive them to extravagant systems.
The cause of the equivocation is, that the two identical conceptions are presented to the intellect under different forms; and until we have the form, and look to what is under it, we shall not discover the identity.
A Treatise against Equivocationor Fraudulent Dissimulation, what I supposed might be the work in request: but being prepossessed with the notion that the work was in print, I did not pursue any inquiry in that direction.
The last class of objections to the theory of natural moral perceptions which it is necessary for me to notice, arises from a very mischievous equivocation in the word natural.
This equivocation seems to me to lie at the root of the famous dispute whether man is by nature a social being, or whether, as Hobbes averred, the state of nature is a state of war.
Witness the famous equivocation about the ox-hide which, when cut up into thongs, was large enough to enclose the site of Carthage.
Pope's equivocation is to the equivocation of ordinary men what a tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in England.
The later prophecies of the Witches Macbeth calls 'the equivocation of the fiend That lies like truth' (V.
