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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
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
Knees
Better
Jerks
Knee
Jerk
More quotes by William Safire
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.
William Safire
If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.
William Safire
What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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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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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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Never assume the obvious is true.
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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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Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.
William Safire
You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
William Safire
Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.
William Safire
Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
William Safire
George Washington had a tough second term.
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I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
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Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.
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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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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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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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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.
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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.
William Safire