William Safire Quotes
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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
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What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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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.
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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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Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.
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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
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The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
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Do not put statements in the negative form. And don't start sentences with a conjunction. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all. De-accession euphemisms. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
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Have a definite opinion.
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Previously known for its six syllables of sweetness and light, reconciliation has become the political fighting word of the year.
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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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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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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.
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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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Took me a while to get to the point today, but that is because I did not know what the point was when I started.
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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 want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.
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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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Different regions may require different strategies, as President Bush has noted, but not different basic principles. It's either collective security or selective security.
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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.
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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.
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The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama?ridicule and reproach?pleading and persuasion.
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Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'
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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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Some handsome and ambitious men believe they are above all morality, and a woman's virtue becomes a mere challenge to them.
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Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.
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Never assume the obvious is true.
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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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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 tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.
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