William Lewis Safir Quotes
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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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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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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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Don't expect others to do your work for you.
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This is what it's all about. From what I could see, you could get a bunch of people together, whip up the press and have some impact.
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The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
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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 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.
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Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.
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To 'know your place' is a good idea in politics. That is not to say 'stay in your place' or 'hang on to your place', because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place - a feel for one's own position in the control room-is useful in gauging what you should try to do.
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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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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We are all environmentalists now, but we are not all planetists. An environmentalist realizes that nature has its pleasures and deserves respect. A planetist puts the earth ahead of the earthlings.
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George Washington had a tough second term.
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Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.
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Decide on some imperfect Somebody and you will win, because the truest truism in politics is: You can't beat Somebody with Nobody.
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A dependent clause is like a dependent child: incapable of standing on its own but able to cause a lot of trouble.
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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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The wonderful thing about being a New York Times columnist is that it's like a Supreme Court appointment - they're stuck with you for a long time.
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I want my questions answered by an alert and experienced politician, prepared to be grilled and quoted -- not my hand held by an old smoothie.