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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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
Constituency
Create
Infuriated
More quotes by William Safire
Previously known for its six syllables of sweetness and light, reconciliation has become the political fighting word of the year.
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What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control.
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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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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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Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
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The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.
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Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.
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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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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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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'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.
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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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