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English is a stretch language one size fits all.

William Safire

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William Safire
Age: 79 †
Born: 1929
Born: December 17
Died: 2009
Died: September 27
Author
Columnist
Journalist
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New York City
New York
William Lewis Safire
English
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More quotes by William Safire

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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.
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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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
William Safire
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I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.
William Safire
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Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.
William Safire
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When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
William Safire
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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
William Safire
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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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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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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.
William Safire
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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.
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'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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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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Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.
William Safire
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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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The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
William Safire