Top 87 William Safire Quotes
#1. More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth.
Lewis H. Lapham
#2. The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama?ridicule and reproach?pleading and persuasion.
William Safire
#3. Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
William Safire
#4. When infuriated by an outrageous column, do not be suckered into responding with an abusive e-mail. Pundits so targeted thumb through these red-faced electronic missives with delight, saying 'Hah! Got to 'em.'
William Safire
#5. A dependent clause is like a dependent child: incapable of standing on its own but able to cause a lot of trouble.
William Safire
#6. 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.
William Safire
#7. At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
William Safire
#8. Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
William Safire
#9. Stop worrying about the 'dumbing down' of our language by bloggers, tweeters, cableheads and MSM thumbsuckers engaged in a 'race to the bottom' of the page by little minds confined to little words.
William Safire
#10. 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 ...
William Safire
#11. 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 Safire
#12. A man who lies, thinking it is the truth, is an honest man, and a man who tells the truth, believing it to be a lie, is a liar.
William Safire
#13. The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.
William Safire
#14. 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.
William Safire
#15. Gridlock is great. My motto is, 'Don't just do something. Stand there.'
William Safire
#16. On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' ... Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.
William Safire
#17. 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 Safire
#18. I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
William Safire
#19. The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.
William Safire
#21. Never look for the story in the 'lede.' Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.
William Safire
#22. By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.
William Safire
#23. Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.
William Safire
#24. Decide on some imperfect Somebody and you will win, because the truest truism in politics is: You can't beat Somebody with Nobody.
William Safire
#25. 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.
William Safire
#26. 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 Safire
#27. Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing; the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin.
William Safire
#28. One challenge to the arts in America is the need to make the arts, especially the classic masterpieces, accessible and relevant to today's audience.
William Safire
#29. President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
William Safire
#30. Different regions may require different strategies, as President Bush has noted, but not different basic principles. It's either collective security or selective security.
William Safire
#32. Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.
William Safire
#34. Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.
William Safire
#35. As long as one American is hungry ... then we have unfinished business in this country.
William Safire
#36. To communicate, put your words in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
William Safire
#37. To be accused of 'channeling' is to be dismissed as a ventriloquist's live dummy, derogated at not having a mind of one's own.
William Safire
#38. Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.
William Safire
#39. In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system,
non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor,
judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's
order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.
William Safire
#40. Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor; but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.
William Safire
#41. Previously known for its six syllables of sweetness and light, reconciliation has become the political fighting word of the year.
William Safire
#42. I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.
William Safire
#43. It is in the nature of tyranny to deride the will of the people as the voice of the mob, and to denounce the cry for freedom as the roar of anarchy.
William Safire
#44. A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.
William Safire
#45. When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
William Safire
#46. 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.
William Safire
#47. It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
William Safire
#48. Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
William Safire
#49. [Senators John Kerry & John Edwards] have risen high in Democratic polls with a brand of class resentment and soak-the-rich rhetoric rooted in the old-fashioned liberalism of Ted Kennedy.
William Safire
#50. Do not be taken in by 'insiderisms.' Fledgling columnists, eager to impress readers with their grasp of journalistic jargon, are drawn to such arcane spellings as 'lede.' Where they lede, do not follow.
William Safire
#51. What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
William Safire
#52. No one flower can ever symbolize this nation. America is a bouquet ...
William Safire
#53. 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.
William Safire
#54. Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
William Safire
#55. Some handsome and ambitious men believe they are above all morality, and a woman's virtue becomes a mere challenge to them.
William Safire
#56. One difference between French appeasement and American appeasement is that France pays ransom in cash and gets its hostages back while the United States pays ransom in arms and gets additional hostages taken.
William Safire
#57. 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 Safire
#58. Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.
William Safire
#59. If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
William Safire
#60. Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. And don't start a sentence with a conjugation.
William Safire
#61. I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
William Safire
#62. The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
William Safire
#63. The noun phrase straw man, now used as a compound adjective as in 'straw-man device, technique or issue,' was popularized in American culture by 'The Wizard of Oz.'
William Safire
#65. 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.
William Safire
#66. A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.
William Safire
#67. Today, war of necessity is used by critics of military action to describe unavoidable response to an attack like that on Pearl Harbor that led to our prompt, official declaration of war, while they characterize as unwise wars of choice the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the current war in Iraq.
William Safire
#69. It's Bush's baby, even if he shares its popularization with Gorbachev. Forget the Hitler 'new order' root; F.D.R. used the phrase earlier.
William Safire
#70. Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.
William Safire
#71. I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know.
William Safire
#72. In dealing with Syria's dictator ... only force counts. No cease-fire was attainable in Lebanon until the 16-inch guns of the battleship New Jersey started shelling Syria's proxies; suddenly, sweet reason prevailed in Damascus.
William Safire
#73. 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 Safire
#75. The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.
William Safire
#76. Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
William Safire
#77. A reader should be able to identify a column without its byline or funny little picture on top purely by look or feel, or its turgidity ratio.
William Safire
#79. When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
William Safire
#80. The first ladyship is the only federal office in which the holder can neither be fired nor impeached.
William Safire
#81. Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?
William Safire
#82. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, when he was British Foreign Secretary, said he received the following telegram from an irate citizen: "To hell with you. Offensive letter follows."
William Safire
#84. I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
William Safire
#85. 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 Safire
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
