Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by William Safire - Page 2

I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.

Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'

The first ladyship is the only federal office in which the holder can neither be fired nor impeached.

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 . . .

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.

Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.

Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

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.

Different regions may require different strategies, as President Bush has noted, but not different basic principles. It's either collective security or selective security.

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.

Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.

To communicate, put your words in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.

If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.

Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.

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.

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.

Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.

... 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.

I was standing next to a famed geo-politician when the first news of the Argentine attack [on the Faulkland Islands] was received, and heard him muse incredulously: "An old-fashioned naval battle. A war between two civilized nations, perhaps with even a declaration of war, and later a peace conference. Wow." No hostages, no nukes, no ideologies, no religious fanaticism; just a fair-and-square war over national interests - hard to believe, in this day and age.

The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.

[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.

You don't overturn a previous court's decisions lightly and I think most Americans are somewhere in the middle on abortion and there's not going to be a revolution here at all.

Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.

By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.

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.

Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?

Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.

George Washington had a tough second term.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama?ridicule and reproach?pleading and persuasion.

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.