William Lewis Safir (William Safire) Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I found my first dinosaur bone when I was 6, growing up in Montana. Ever since then I've been interested in dinosaurs.
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I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
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We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.
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Being evil is easy.
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Let's all understand that these guiding principles cannot be discarded for short-term political gains. They represent what this country is all about. They are indigenous to the American idea. And these are principles which are not negotiable.
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The most successful Subway customers, of course, are the ones who can't keep their hands off their sandwich. Join your artist in the sandwich assembling process. That sneeze guard is a suggestion. That sneeze guard is trying to intimidate you into staying on the customer's side of the partition.
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San Francisco, coolest place ever.
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Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow.
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All of my main characters have been under 30.
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The presidential candidates are offering prescriptions for everything from Iraq to healthcare, but listen closely. Their fixes are situational and incremental. Meanwhile, the underlying structural problems in American politics and government are systemic and prevent us from solving our most intractable challenges.
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Beer, it's the best damn drink in the world.
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All you can do is focus on telling the best story you can with compelling characters. If you do it right, it will endure. If you do it wrong, it won't.
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I will negotiate with my worst enemy.
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Mass layoffs produce big winners and losers. Most workers who remain are financially unscathed, even though their employer is struggling.
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I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person, like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house, and I just started, for lack of a better term, running free.
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The door might not be opened to a woman again for a long, long time, and I had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit down on the chair that was offered, and so establish the right of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit in the high seats.
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What is important is to have values in life. What's important is how you are, not how you look.
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I also hear your president say that war is the means of last resort and I think he means that. I met him last autumn and he assured me that they wanted to come through and disarm Iraq by peaceful means, and that's what we are trying to do as hard as we can.
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Gritty people train at the edge of their comfort zone. They zero in on one narrow aspect of their performance and set a stretch goal to improve it.
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From 18 to 22, I was alone, living in L.A. with a bunch of friends, partying.
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In many parts of our country, geography and population density can make it difficult to attract private investment. These communities depend on federal investments to maintain and upgrade their transportation systems and stay competitive. And we know that it's an investment worth making. Because when rural America succeeds, we all do.
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I think we all need to be looking to the better angels of our own selves. We don't need to be looking for great people so much as becoming great people.
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America is an open society, more open than any other in the world. People of every race, of every color, of every culture are welcomed here to create a new life for themselves and their families. And what do these people who enter into the American mainstream have in common? English, our shared common language.
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No one flower can ever symbolize this nation. America is a bouquet.
