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The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.

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
Breaking
Rule
Fun
Knowing

More quotes by 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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What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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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.
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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.
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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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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
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Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
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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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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.
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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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Never assume the obvious is true.
William Safire
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In dealing with Syria's dictator...only force counts. No cease-fire was attainable in Lebanon until the 16-inch guns of the battleship New Jersey started shelling Syria's proxies suddenly, sweet reason prevailed in Damascus.
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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
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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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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When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
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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The first ladyship is the only federal office in which the holder can neither be fired nor impeached.
William Safire
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It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
William Safire