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Gridlock is great. My motto is, 'Don't just do something. Stand there.'

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
Gridlock
Motto
Stand
Politics
Great
Something

More quotes by William Safire

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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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A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.
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The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
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By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.
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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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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.
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When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
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The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
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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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Never assume the obvious is true.
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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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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.
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Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace.
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The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.
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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.
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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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You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
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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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[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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The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
William Safire