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The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
William Lewis Safir -
Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.
William Lewis Safir
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By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.
William Lewis Safir -
Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
William Lewis Safir -
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.
William Lewis Safir -
Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.
William Lewis Safir -
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
William Lewis Safir -
To communicate, put your words in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
William Lewis Safir
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I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
William Lewis Safir -
Never assume the obvious is true.
William Lewis Safir -
I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
William Lewis Safir -
President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
William Lewis Safir -
The remarkable legion of the unremarked, whose individual opinions are not colorful or different enough to make news, but whose collective opinion, when crystallized, can make history.
William Lewis Safir -
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.
William Lewis Safir
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
William Lewis Safir -
This is not some alarmist Orwellian scenario; it is here, now, financed by $20 billion last year and $15 billion more this year of federal money appropriated out of sheer fear. By creating the means to monitor 300 million visits to the United States yearly, this administration and a supine opposition are building a system capable of identifying, tracking and spying on 300 million Americans.
William Lewis Safir -
I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
William Lewis Safir -
At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
William Lewis Safir -
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.
William Lewis Safir -
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.
William Lewis Safir
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Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace.
William Lewis Safir -
If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
William Lewis Safir -
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.
William Lewis Safir -
When duty calls, that is when character counts.
William Lewis Safir