William Safire Quotes

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

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.

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

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

Don't expect others to do your work for you.

No one flower can ever symbolize this nation. America is a bouquet.

A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.

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.

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.

When duty calls, that is when character counts.

Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.

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.

I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Gridlock is great. My motto is, 'Don't just do something. Stand there.'

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.

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.

You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.

What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.

The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.

Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.

Have a definite opinion.

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.

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

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.

English is a stretch language; one size fits all.

George Washington had a tough second term.

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.

Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.

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.

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

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.

Do not put statements in the negative form. And don't start sentences with a conjunction. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all. De-accession euphemisms. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'

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