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When duty calls, that is when character counts.

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
Counts
Calls
Duty
Character

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The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
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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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Don't expect others to do your work for you.
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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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When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control.
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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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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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One difference between French appeasement and American appeasement is that France pays ransom in cash and gets its hostages back while the United States pays ransom in arms and gets additional hostages taken.
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A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.
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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.
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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
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When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
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Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.
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Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. And don't start a sentence with a conjugation.
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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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The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.
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Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
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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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Decide on some imperfect Somebody and you will win, because the truest truism in politics is: You can't beat Somebody with Nobody.
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It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
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