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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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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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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Never assume the obvious is true.
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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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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
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When duty calls, that is when character counts.
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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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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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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.
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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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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
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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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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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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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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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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.
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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 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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A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.
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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.