Circumlocution Quotes

It is a tiresome way of speaking, when you should despatch the business, to beat about the bush.

It could not, in the opinion of His Majesty's Government, be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.

Gobbledygook! [The word was born.]

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—how not to do it. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart.

People don't like when people are straight forward. They like things to be sugar coated. They like to beat around the bush. I'm not that type of person.

The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies [synonyms] and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. Things never called by their common names. Massacre is sometimes called agitation, sometimes effervescence, sometimes excess sometimes too continued an exercise of revolutionary power.

I don't like to repeat myself.

I use circumlocution too often, and instead of getting my point across, I tend to babble.

Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.

I don't quite know why, but I am long-winded.

Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.