Life & Wisdom Quote by Lewis Grizzard

Lewis Grizzard, the Southern humorist and longtime Atlanta newspaper columnist, had a knack for turning plain talk into moral clarity. He draws a sharp line between human fallibility and deliberate evasiveness. People expect mistakes; they do not expect contempt. When someone owns an error, apologizes, and makes it right, the audience reads humility and respect. When someone dodges, blames, or buries the facts, the audience reads calculation and disdain. The act of wriggling is worse than the misstep because it signals a willingness to mislead and a belief that others are fools.

Public life has illustrated this lesson over and over. Watergate lives in memory not only for the break-in but for the cover-up. The best crisis playbooks begin with acceptance of responsibility, transparency, and repair; Johnson & Johnson’s response to the Tylenol tampering scandal became a case study because it treated the public as partners rather than marks. By contrast, hedged non-apologies and lawyerly half-truths turn a solvable problem into a character verdict. Social media has only intensified this dynamic: receipts last, and the gap between what someone did and what they say they did gets measured in real time.

Grizzard’s phrasing matters. To wriggle and weasel evokes something slippery, small, and determined to escape a basic duty. It is not merely a strategic mistake; it is a moral posture that corrodes trust. The public may forgive what happened; it withholds forgiveness when it suspects someone will do anything to avoid accountability next time too.

As a columnist who skewered pretension and hypocrisy in politics, sports, and everyday life, Grizzard spoke from long observation. The lesson is durable: admit the truth quickly, take your lumps, make amends, and let people see you learn. Fallibility is forgivable; arrogance and duplicity are not.