To waver in coming to a conclusion, to be irresolute; to hesitate, delay.
But at a moment calling for decisiveness, he is, in Churchill's phrase, "resolved to be irresolute".
To equivocate is closer to prevaricate, dissimulate, which mean "to obscure so as to deceive," or more plainly, "to lie," and to dither, hesitate, falter is "to be irresolute in action, unsteady in belief".
But in another remarkable phrase he warned his contemporaries that they must never be, as he put it: "Resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity and all powerful for impotence".
Worse still, if a reconstruction plan does not come soon, Europe's leaders will be charged with "the decline of the West" and then face accusations for being, in the words of Winston Churchill about the 1930s, "resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity and all-powerful for impotence".
To quote Churchill, Europe's leaders seemdecided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotentA year or two ago, the EU leaders seemed to be operating on the theory that, if Greece could just be propped up, Italy and Spain would have the time to address the problem.
under siege from spectators, who threw objects at him dispelled for the moment the notion that he was irresolute.
Sparta, resolute in war as it was irresolute in politics, scored a crushing victory over its enemies.
He recognized that when he was irresolute it was in response to his upbringing, but caution, in general, paid off for him.
He is irresolute and avoids accountability as in summer of 2017 when he tried to get Secretary of Defense James Mattis to make the decision on increasing troop strength in Afghanistan.
Mr. Bush's problem, it seems, was not so much that he was dissolute as that he was irresolute.
