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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
Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.
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Took me a while to get to the point today, but that is because I did not know what the point was when I started.
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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
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Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.
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Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
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... 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.
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Previously known for its six syllables of sweetness and light, reconciliation has become the political fighting word of the year.
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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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.
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To communicate, put your words in order give them a purpose use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
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What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama?ridicule and reproach?pleading and persuasion.
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This is what it's all about. From what I could see, you could get a bunch of people together, whip up the press and have some impact.
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Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
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I want my questions answered by an alert and experienced politician, prepared to be grilled and quoted -- not my hand held by an old smoothie.
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The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.
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English is a stretch language one size fits all.
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In dealing with Syria's dictator...only force counts. No cease-fire was attainable in Lebanon until the 16-inch guns of the battleship New Jersey started shelling Syria's proxies suddenly, sweet reason prevailed in Damascus.
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One difference between French appeasement and American appeasement is that France pays ransom in cash and gets its hostages back while the United States pays ransom in arms and gets additional hostages taken.
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The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
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