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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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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
Child
Clause
Able
Clauses
Children
Incapable
Like
Dependent
Standing
Cause
Trouble
Causes

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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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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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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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Have a definite opinion.
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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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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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The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
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Previously known for its six syllables of sweetness and light, reconciliation has become the political fighting word of the year.
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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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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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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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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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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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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.
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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 . . .
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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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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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[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.
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When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
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