Quote

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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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
Communicate
Purpose
Words
Seduce
Use
Instruct
Order
Seducing
Give
Persuade
Giving
Clarity
Discover

More quotes by William Safire

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Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
William Safire
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You don't overturn a previous court's decisions lightly and I think most Americans are somewhere in the middle on abortion and there's not going to be a revolution here at all.
William Safire
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You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
William Safire
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Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
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
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George Washington had a tough second term.
William Safire
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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
William Safire
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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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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.'
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
William Safire
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When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
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.
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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The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
William Safire
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English is a stretch language one size fits all.
William Safire
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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
William Safire
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Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.
William Safire