William Lewis Safir Quotes
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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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The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
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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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By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.
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I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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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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The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
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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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Never assume the obvious is true.
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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
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Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.
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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
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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.
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The CEO era gave rise to the CFO (not certified flying object, as you might imagine, but chief financial officer) and, most recently, the CIO, chief investment officer, a nice boost for the bookkeeper you can't afford to give a raise . . .
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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
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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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When duty calls, that is when character counts.
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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.
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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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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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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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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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Different regions may require different strategies, as President Bush has noted, but not different basic principles. It's either collective security or selective security.