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A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.

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
Familiar
Reader
Hold
Ought
Become
Manageable
Able
Contents
Mind
Companion
Make
Organized

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When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
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By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.
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Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.
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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.
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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.
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Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?
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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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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.
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Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.
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Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.
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Gridlock is great. My motto is, 'Don't just do something. Stand there.'
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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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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A dependent clause is like a dependent child: incapable of standing on its own but able to cause a lot of trouble.
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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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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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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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To 'know your place' is a good idea in politics. That is not to say 'stay in your place' or 'hang on to your place', because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place - a feel for one's own position in the control room-is useful in gauging what you should try to do.
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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