Quote

Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.

William Safire

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Safire
Age: 79 †
Born: 1929
Born: December 17
Died: 2009
Died: September 27
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
William Lewis Safire
Decision
Pundit
Means
Pundits
Write
Column
Two
Columns
Hard
Aside
Mean
Cast
Writing
Casts
Subjects

More quotes by William Safire

Image
If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
William Safire
Image
Don't expect others to do your work for you.
William Safire
Image
... 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
Image
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
Image
Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.
William Safire
Image
I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
William Safire
Image
Some handsome and ambitious men believe they are above all morality, and a woman's virtue becomes a mere challenge to them.
William Safire
Image
To communicate, put your words in order give them a purpose use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
William Safire
Image
Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.
William Safire
Image
You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
William Safire
Image
A reader should be able to identify a column without its byline or funny little picture on top purely by look or feel, or its turgidity ratio.
William Safire
Image
Never look for the story in the 'lede.' Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.
William Safire
Image
Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.
William Safire
Image
The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
William Safire
Image
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.
William Safire
Image
[Senators John Kerry & John Edwards] have risen high in Democratic polls with a brand of class resentment and soak-the-rich rhetoric rooted in the old-fashioned liberalism of Ted Kennedy.
William Safire
Image
President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
William Safire
Image
I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
William Safire
Image
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.
William Safire
Image
It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
William Safire