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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

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George Washington had a tough second term.
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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
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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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A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.
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Some handsome and ambitious men believe they are above all morality, and a woman's virtue becomes a mere challenge to them.
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If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.
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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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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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Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.
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Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin.
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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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Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.
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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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Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.
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Have a definite opinion.
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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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Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?
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I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.
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