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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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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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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I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.
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The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.
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Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.
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If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.
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I have an orthodox style that a southpaw is confused with me.
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Iraq is sort of a situation where you've got a guy who drove the bus into the ditch. You obviously have to get the bus out of the ditch, and that's not easy to do, although you probably should fire the driver.
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A too closely watched flower blossoms the wrong color. Excess attention to the jonquil turns it gentian. Flowers need it tranquil to get their hues right. Some only open at midnight.
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No one flower can ever symbolize this nation. America is a bouquet.
