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Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'
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
Quotations
Marks
Avoid
Mark
Overuse
Quotation
More quotes by William Safire
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.
William Safire
Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.
William Safire
No one flower can ever symbolize this nation. America is a bouquet.
William Safire
Don't expect others to do your work for you.
William Safire
Decide on some imperfect Somebody and you will win, because the truest truism in politics is: You can't beat Somebody with Nobody.
William Safire
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
Have a definite opinion.
William Safire
If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.
William Safire
Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.
William Safire
When duty calls, that is when character counts.
William Safire
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.
William Safire
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
What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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
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
To communicate, put your words in order give them a purpose use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
William Safire
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.
William Safire
Sir Alec Douglas-Home, when he was British Foreign Secretary, said he received the following telegram from an irate citizen: To hell with you. Offensive letter follows.
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
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