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Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.

William Safire

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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
Used
Bare
Ruined
Sing
Writers
Longer
Media
Show
Erudition
Shows
Choir

More quotes by William Safire

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A man who lies, thinking it is the truth, is an honest man, and a man who tells the truth, believing it to be a lie, is a liar.
William Safire
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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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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
William Safire
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The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.
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By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.
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George Washington had a tough second term.
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When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control.
William Safire
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Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.
William Safire
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I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.
William Safire
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Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'
William Safire
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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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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.
William Safire
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To be accused of 'channeling' is to be dismissed as a ventriloquist's live dummy, derogated at not having a mind of one's own.
William Safire
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Never assume the obvious is true.
William Safire
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On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.
William Safire
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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
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English is a stretch language one size fits all.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire