C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Equivocation
There is no possible excuse for a guarded lie. Enthusiastic and impulsive people will sometimes falsify thoughtlessly, but equivocation is malice prepense.
Hosea Ballou.
Shakespeare.
A sudden lie may be sometimes only manslaughter upon truth; but by a carefully constructed equivocation, truth always is with malice aforethought deliberately murdered.
Morley.
Shakespeare.
Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.
Shakespeare.