William Safire Quotes - Page 3

I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.

Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.

Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.

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.

Previously known for its six syllables of sweetness and light, reconciliation has become the political fighting word of the year.

Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.

I was standing next to a famed geo-politician when the first news of the Argentine attack [on the Faulkland Islands] was received, and heard him muse incredulously: "An old-fashioned naval battle. A war between two civilized nations, perhaps with even a declaration of war, and later a peace conference. Wow." No hostages, no nukes, no ideologies, no religious fanaticism; just a fair-and-square war over national interests - hard to believe, in this day and age.

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.

The CEO era gave rise to the CFO (not certified flying object, as you might imagine, but chief financial officer) and, most recently, the CIO, chief investment officer, a nice boost for the bookkeeper you can't afford to give a raise . . .

The first ladyship is the only federal office in which the holder can neither be fired nor impeached.

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.

It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.

Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?

When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.

Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'

Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

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.

I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.

... 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.

[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.

A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.

George Washington had a tough second term.

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.

A reader should be able to identify a column without its byline or funny little picture on top purely by look or feel, or its turgidity ratio.