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The first ladyship is the only federal office in which the holder can neither be fired nor impeached.

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
Federal
Neither
Office
Firsts
First
Impeached
Holder
Fired

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Different regions may require different strategies, as President Bush has noted, but not different basic principles. It's either collective security or selective security.
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George Washington had a tough second term.
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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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Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
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Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.
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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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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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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
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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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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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Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'
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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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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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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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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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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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Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.
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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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Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.
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