130 Quotes by William Safire

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.

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

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.

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.

Avoid overuse of ‘quotation “marks.”’

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