Top 70 William Safire Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— William Safire

2. “When duty calls, that is when character counts.”

— William Safire

3. “Never assume the obvious is true.”

— William Safire

4. “Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.”

— William Safire

5. “Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.”

— William Safire

6. “Avoid overuse of ‘quotation “marks.”’”

— William Safire

7. “English is a stretch language; one size fits all.”

— William Safire

8. “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.”

— William Safire

9. “Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.”

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

15. “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.”

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

17. “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.”

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

21. “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.”

— William Safire

22. “Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.”

— William Safire

23. “When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.”

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

27. “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.”

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

29. “Gridlock is great. My motto is, ‘Don’t just do something. Stand there.’”

— William Safire

30. “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.”

— William Safire

31. “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.”

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

33. “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.”

— William Safire

34. “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.”

— William Safire

35. “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.”

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

37. “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.”

— William Safire

38. “Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.”

— William Safire

39. “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.”

— William Safire

40. “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.”

— William Safire

41. “Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.”

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

44. “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.”

— William Safire

45. “Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.”

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

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

— William Safire

50. “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.””

— William Safire