William Safire Quotations

What do you call a co-worker these days? Neither teammate nor confederate will do, and partner is too legalistic. The answer brought from academia to the political world by Henry Kissinger and now bandied in the boardroom is colleague. It has a nice upper-egalitarian feel, related to the good fellowship of collegial.

Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

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.'

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.

When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.

The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.

Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.

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.

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

I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know.

When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.

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.

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

Previously known for its six syllables of sweetness and light, reconciliation has become the political fighting word of the year.

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

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

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.

A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.

Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.

I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.

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.

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.'

She would take it and perform a typographical miracle. It was like looking at an E. E. Cummings page.

For the sake of the country, the conservative cause, the Republican party and even his own long-term career -- he ought to resign.

The phrase "New World Order" is Bush's baby, even if he shares its popularization with Gorbachev. Forget the Hitler 'new order' root; F.D.R. used the phrase earlier.

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care

Because that would be foolish politically, and I think there's a lot of practicality going on.

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

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

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

Create your own constituency of the infuriated.

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 . . .

[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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Our rogue President, after selling face time...

Decide on some imperfect Somebody and you will win, because the truest truism in politics is: You can't beat Somebody with Nobody.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.

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.

When duty calls, that is when character counts.

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

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.

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.

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.

English is a stretch language; one size fits all.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace.

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.

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

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

Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.

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.

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.

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

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

Never assume the obvious is true.

I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.

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

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.

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

Have a definite opinion.

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

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."

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.

Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'

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.

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

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.

... 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.

As long as one American is hungry... then we have unfinished business in this country.