130 Quotes by William Safire

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.

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