Top 100 Russell Baker Quotes

#1. My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #16680
#2. Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #27600
#3. Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #29528
#4. Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories
those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #51533
#5. The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #72146
#6. Grass is the least rewarding of all status symbols ... The grass does nothing but drink money, exhaust energies, crush spirits, destroy sleep, create tensions and interfere with the watching of baseball games, and sprout insolent signs ordering humans to keep off it.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #74153
#7. The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #109862
#8. In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #123382
#9. I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #243240
#10. The people who say: 'You are what you eat' have always seemed addled to me. In my opinion, you are what you think, and if you don't think, you can eat all the meat in Kansas City and still be nothing but a vegetable.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #252567
#11. Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #261460
#12. What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #299711
#13. Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #326938
#14. Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #343828
#15. Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #362364
#16. A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #376278
#17. The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #385588
#18. A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #403657
#19. I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #415445
#20. Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #448130
#21. It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #519749
#22. Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #535481
#23. Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #536204
#24. People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #570967
#25. People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #605804
#26. The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don't do it. I have been out there. It is a mess.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #622024
#27. Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #675889
#28. Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #689165
#29. There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #726964
#30. The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #742137
#31. It is safest to shut up and pay, which is what I shall eventually do, though I shall hate having to sell the children.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #784490
#32. What sweeter words can fall on the human ear? It's going to be May all week long.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #789732
#33. Serious journalism need not be solemn.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #793798
#34. You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there's a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #804812
#35. A $10 million windfall? At today's prices, I'd feel almost as rich as I did one day in 1936 when I found a dime on the sidewalk and blew the whole wad on 20 Mary Jane candy bars, a box of jujubes, and a double feature.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #815835
#36. Ireland really is my problem; the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #825173
#37. Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #870680
#38. Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #896376
#39. Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #900305
#40. There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicians' advise not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #903168
#41. When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #909941
#42. The lobbies of the new hotels and the Pan American Building exhale a chill as from the unopened Pharaonic tombs ... And in their marble labyrinths there is an evil presence that hates warmth and sunlight.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #931586
#43. In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #934706
#44. Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #944524
#45. I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families
sometimes into no family at all. When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #962522
#46. Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #985339
#47. The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #988666
#48. Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on 'canned' laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1002320
#49. Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1019822
#50. A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1024660
#51. The French fried potato has become an inescapable horror in almost every public eating place in the country. 'French fries', say the menus, but they are not French fries any longer. They are a furry-textured substance with the taste of plastic wood.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1028927
#52. When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1037342
#53. Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated the lesson of history.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1065362
#54. The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1069320
#55. What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1084326
#56. There are no liberals behind steering wheels.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1092983
#57. It's always seemed odd to me that after a group of terrorists commits a vile and odious deed they rush messages to the public to claim credit for it.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1146499
#58. After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1151683
#59. A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1154730
#60. The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1169777
#61. It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1182251
#62. The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic ... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1195614
#63. The dirty work at political conventions is almost always done in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1214028
#64. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1218283
#65. Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1231920
#66. We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a refrigerator into a fifth floor walk-up.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1244220
#67. Skinny women don't enjoy being told they're skinny nowadays. They enjoy telling you how they got that way, as though starvation were an achievement.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1253067
#68. Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1303545
#69. It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1316989
#70. Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1317724
#71. Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1382707
#72. An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1412159
#73. A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1438956
#74. There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1452099
#75. Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1460551
#76. Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1468885
#77. Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they'll be playing on oriental rugs.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1480680
#78. In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1494861
#79. The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1506741
#80. It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1536622
#81. Baltimore is permissiveness. The pleasures of the flesh, the table, the bottle, and the purse are tolerated with a civilized understanding.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1574213
#82. Long words, fat talk they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1577482
#83. There was scarcely a woman alive, it seemed, who could resist the urge to haul men down onto beds, car seats, kitchen floors, dining-room tables, park grass, parlor sofas, or packing crates, entwine warm thighs around them, and pant in ecstasy.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1584116
#84. Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1616857
#85. Now scarcely a week goes by without a news story about the cops swooping down on some adolescent prowler who is as skilled at breaking into computer systems as defense contractors are at breaking into the Federal budget.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1625316
#86. A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1625450
#87. Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1628549
#88. The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1633774
#89. The sinister nature of the American soil is apparent in places like Gettysburg. Fertilize it with the blood of heros, and it brings forth a frozen-custard stand.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1646173
#90. Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1678656
#91. American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1682777
#92. I've had an unhappy life, thank God.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1699142
#93. Schoolteachers seemed determined to persuade me that 'classic' is a synonym for 'narcotic'.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1699754
#94. Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1729038
#95. Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1758265
#96. It's good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1767127
#97. Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1800566
#98. Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1811907
#99. When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1844213
#100. Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother.

Russell Baker

Russell Baker Quotes #1854224

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