Best quotes by William Safire

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

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.

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

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

Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.

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.

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.

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

When duty calls, that is when character counts.

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

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

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.

When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.

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

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.

Never assume the obvious is true.

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.

Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.