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By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.

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
Elevating
Improve
Least
Reading
Writing
Thinking
Tickle

More quotes by William Safire

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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.
William Safire
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A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
William Safire
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The CEO era gave rise to the CFO (not certified flying object, as you might imagine, but chief financial officer) and, most recently, the CIO, chief investment officer, a nice boost for the bookkeeper you can't afford to give a raise . . .
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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Never assume the obvious is true.
William Safire
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[Senators John Kerry & John Edwards] have risen high in Democratic polls with a brand of class resentment and soak-the-rich rhetoric rooted in the old-fashioned liberalism of Ted Kennedy.
William Safire
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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
William Safire
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Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?
William Safire
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Gridlock is great. My motto is, 'Don't just do something. Stand there.'
William Safire
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What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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Don't expect others to do your work for you.
William Safire
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On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.
William Safire
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
William Safire
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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