William Lewis Safir Quotes
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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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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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Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.
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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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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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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 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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What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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George Washington had a tough second term.
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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Don't expect others to do your work for you.
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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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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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Gridlock is great. My motto is, 'Don't just do something. Stand there.'
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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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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.