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

More quotes by 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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Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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English is a stretch language one size fits all.
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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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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Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.
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It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
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Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
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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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[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.
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Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.
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When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
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In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.'
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Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
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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.
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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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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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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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Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
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