Best quotes by William Safire

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

[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.

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.

George Washington had a tough second term.

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.

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

Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'

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

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.

Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 . . .

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

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

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

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.

English is a stretch language; one size fits all.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a definite opinion.

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.

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

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."

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.

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

Create your own constituency of the infuriated.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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