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When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
William Safire
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William Safire
Age: 79 †
Born: 1929
Born: December 17
Died: 2009
Died: September 27
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New York City
New York
William Lewis Safire
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More quotes by William Safire
Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.
William Safire
Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
William Safire
... it's Bush's baby, even if he shares its popularization with Gorbachev. Forget the Hitler 'new order' root F.D.R. used the phrase earlier.
William Safire
President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
William Safire
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
William Safire
I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.
William Safire
After eating, an epicure gives a thin smile of satisfaction a gastronome, burping into his napkin, praises the food in a magazine a gourmet, repressing his burp, criticizes the food in the same magazine a gourmand belches happily and tells everybody where he ate a glutton empraces the white porcelain alter, or more plainly, he barfs.
William Safire
The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
William Safire
George Washington had a tough second term.
William Safire
We are all environmentalists now, but we are not all planetists. An environmentalist realizes that nature has its pleasures and deserves respect. A planetist puts the earth ahead of the earthlings.
William Safire
Have a definite opinion.
William Safire
The remarkable legion of the unremarked, whose individual opinions are not colorful or different enough to make news, but whose collective opinion, when crystallized, can make history.
William Safire
Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.
William Safire
What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
William Safire
The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.
William Safire
Never assume the obvious is true.
William Safire
Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin.
William Safire
A dependent clause is like a dependent child: incapable of standing on its own but able to cause a lot of trouble.
William Safire
It is in the nature of tyranny to deride the will of the people as the voice of the mob, and to denounce the cry for freedom as the roar of anarchy.
William Safire
You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
William Safire