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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.

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
Hands
Alert
Answered
Experienced
Held
Questions
Smoothie
Politician
Smoothies
Prepared
Grilled
Hand
Quoted

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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
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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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Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
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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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The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
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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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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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The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
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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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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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Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
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... it's Bush's baby, even if he shares its popularization with Gorbachev. Forget the Hitler 'new order' root F.D.R. used the phrase earlier.
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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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 look for the story in the 'lede.' Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.
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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.
William Safire
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Took me a while to get to the point today, but that is because I did not know what the point was when I started.
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Sir Alec Douglas-Home, when he was British Foreign Secretary, said he received the following telegram from an irate citizen: To hell with you. Offensive letter follows.
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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
William Safire
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I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
William Safire