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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.

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
Reagan
Empathy
Seeking
Politician
Audience
President
Befits
Rhetorical

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Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'
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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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This is what it's all about. From what I could see, you could get a bunch of people together, whip up the press and have some impact.
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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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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
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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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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
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Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.
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Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.
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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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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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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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When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
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Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
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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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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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The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
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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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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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Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.
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