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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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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
Color
Freshness
Grace
Precision
Style
Adapt
Wish
Hang
Clarity
Admit
Structure
Tough
Slang

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Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
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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.
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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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You don't overturn a previous court's decisions lightly and I think most Americans are somewhere in the middle on abortion and there's not going to be a revolution here at all.
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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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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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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.
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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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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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Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'
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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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Have a definite opinion.
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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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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
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Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.
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English is a stretch language one size fits all.
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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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You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
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One challenge to the arts in America is the need to make the arts, especially the classic masterpieces, accessible and relevant to today's audience.
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