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

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The Latin motto over Poindexter's new Pentagon office reads Scientia Est Potentia - knowledge is power. Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you.
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Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.
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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
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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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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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Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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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.
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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.
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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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[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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Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.
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When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
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Different regions may require different strategies, as President Bush has noted, but not different basic principles. It's either collective security or selective security.
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I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
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The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
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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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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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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.
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