Harold Evans > Quotes

“Nothing is so tiring to the reader as excavating nuggets of meaning from mountains of words.”
― Harold Evans, Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers

“Adjectives not susceptible to modifiers are: certain, complete, devoid, empty, entire, essential, everlasting, excellent, external, fatal, final, fundamental, harmless, ideal, immaculate, immortal, impossible, incessant, indestructible, infinite, invaluable, invulnerable, main, omnipotent, perfect, principal, pure, round, simultaneous, square, ultimate, unanimous, unendurable, unique, unspeakable, untouchable, whole, worthless.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“I would have written something shorter, but I didn’t have time.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to anarchist—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Thomson Reuters, for instance, advises reporters and editors: “It is acceptable to say that a guerrilla organization claimed responsibility for carrying out an attack. Do not say it claimed credit.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Governments may know a lot more about our lives than we care to contemplate, but frequently they know less about the world than we presume.”
― Harold Evans, My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times

“President Obama wrote his own speeches. In a visit to a mosque in Baltimore he pitted his eloquence against the anti-Muslim demagoguery of Donald Trump, running for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election. The image Obama evoked was the parable of the Good Samaritan, but indirectly, and look how he did it in a single phrase, the moral thought fused by a gentle alliteration: “None of us can be silent. We can’t be bystanders to bigotry.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“My imagination represents before me a certain great man famous for this talent....The lies which he plentifully distributes every minute he speaks, and by an unparalleled generosity forgets and consequently contradicts the next half hour....He never yet considered whether any proposition were true or false but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company to affirm or deny it; so that if you think to refine upon him, by interpreting everything he says, as we do dreams, by the contrary, you are still to seek, and will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or not: the only remedy is to suppose, that you have heard some inarticulate sounds without any meaning at all. (From “The Art of Political Lying” by Jonathan Swift [1667–1745], author of Gulliver’s Travels)”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Government just cannot govern well without reliable independent reporting and criticism. No intelligence system, no bureaucracy, can offer the information provided by free competitive reporting; the cleverest agents of the secret police state are inferior to the plodding reporter of the democracy.”
― Harold Evans, My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times

“Here’s a sampling I made from the usual suspects (print, TV, radio, magazines). Zombies on the left, purgatives on the right, word counts in parentheses. Accommodation The theater has seating accommodation for 600. (7) The theater seats 600. (4) Activity They enjoyed recreational activity. (4) They liked games. (3) The king agreed to limited exploration activity. (7) The king agreed to limited exploration. (6) Basis He agreed to play on an amateur basis. (8) He agreed to play as an amateur. (7) They accepted employment on a part-time basis. (7) They accepted part-time work. (4)”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Steve Jobs in 1996. I like to think that we may begin with imitation, graduate to emulation, and then aspire to creation.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“later disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew. “In the United States today, we have more than our share of nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4H club—the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“I appreciate engineers, I wrote a book about their achievements, but I deprecate what they and other techies do to English words. Hey, these nouns and verbs aren’t bits of silicon you can dope with chemicals (boron, phosphorus, and arsenic), drop into a kiln at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and slice and dice. Words breathe. They need TLC—you know,”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.”
― Harold Evans

“The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Dr. Jeffrey Filer, dean of the Harvard Medical School,57 is concerned that a small subset of scientists get research published that is not reproducible. He cites the widely cited paper that got into the Lancet in 1998 claiming a link between measles vaccines and autism. It was not retracted until 2010. In the meantime, scared parents exposed their unvaccinated children and others to greater risk. And the false story was still being propagated by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign. There is a straight line between fraud in science and the proliferation of political lies swallowed whole by gullible millions in the 2016 election.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Prepositional verbs grow like toadstools. Once there was credit in facing a problem. Now problems have to be faced up to. The prepositions add nothing of significance.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Fog in the U.S. Supreme Court, where five judges in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010) sanctified secret bribery as freedom of speech.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Orwell, of course: Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to anarchist—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Picasso has been many times quoted as saying good artists copy, great artists steal.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Author Edward Johnson neatly labels such cop-outs as the pussyfooting passive.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters

“Speechwriter Barton Swaim cheerfully explains why the opaque may be a virtue. “Using vague, slippery or just meaningless language,” he writes, “is not the same as lying: it’s not intended to deceive so much as to preserve options, buy time, distance oneself from others, or just to sound like you’re saying something instead of nothing.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“The grossest offenders are in the field of, in connection with, in order to, in respect of, so far as… is concerned. All sorts of things are found flourishing in the field of: in the field of public relations, in the field of breakfast cereals, in the field of book publishing, in the field of railway management, in the field of nuts and bolts, in the field of space exploration. There is no room left on the continent for fields that grow plants. All these in the field land-grabbers should be evicted. Field has a very proper association with battle, chivalry, and war (hence “Never in the field of human conflict”), but the phrase is rarely relevant or necessary.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

“Sir William Haley, one of my predecessors as editor of the Times, said, “There are things which are bad and false and ugly and no amount of specious casuistry will make them good or true or beautiful.”
― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters