William Safire Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

A man in power must have men around him whom his awesome power does not intimidate.

William Safire
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.

William Safire
President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.

William Safire
At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

William Safire
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
The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.

William Safire
Some handsome and ambitious men believe they are above all morality, and a woman's virtue becomes a mere challenge to them.

William Safire
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
The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.

William Safire
In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.

William Safire
And so tonight — to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans — I ask for your support.

William Safire
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
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
I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian. I was the first to really go after George W. on his treatment of prisoners.

William Safire
A dependent clause is like a dependent child: incapable of standing on its own but able to cause a lot of trouble.

William Safire
Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor; but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.

William Safire
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.

William Safire
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.

William Safire
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.

William Safire