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You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
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
Roughshod
Lopsided
Side
Sides
Running
Government
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When duty calls, that is when character counts.
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The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.
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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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Gridlock is great. My motto is, 'Don't just do something. Stand there.'
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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.
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Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.
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English is a stretch language one size fits all.
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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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Don't expect others to do your work for you.
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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A man who lies, thinking it is the truth, is an honest man, and a man who tells the truth, believing it to be a lie, is a liar.
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Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?
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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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Do not be taken in by 'insiderisms.' Fledgling columnists, eager to impress readers with their grasp of journalistic jargon, are drawn to such arcane spellings as 'lede.' Where they lede, do not follow.
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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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This is what it's all about. From what I could see, you could get a bunch of people together, whip up the press and have some impact.
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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.
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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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I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
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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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