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The wonderful thing about being a New York Times columnist is that it's like a Supreme Court appointment - they're stuck with you for a long time.

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
York
Wonderful
Columnist
Times
Columnists
Thing
Appointment
Long
Appointments
Time
Stuck
Like
Supreme
Court

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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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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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Don't expect others to do your work for you.
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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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Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. And don't start a sentence with a conjugation.
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English is a stretch language one size fits all.
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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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To communicate, put your words in order give them a purpose use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
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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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The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.
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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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When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
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It is in the nature of tyranny to deride the will of the people as the voice of the mob, and to denounce the cry for freedom as the roar of anarchy.
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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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The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.
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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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A reader should be able to identify a column without its byline or funny little picture on top purely by look or feel, or its turgidity ratio.
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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
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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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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
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