William Lewis Safir Quotes
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The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.
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When duty calls, that is when character counts.
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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.
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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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Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.
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The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
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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 assume the obvious is true.
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Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
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By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.
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Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.
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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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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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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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[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.
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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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The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
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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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It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
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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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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
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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.