J. A. Baker Quotes

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.

In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.

Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.

A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes.

Nothing lasts-not even pain.

Measured by any standard, white or black, Washington must be regarded today as one of the great men of this country: and in the future he will be so honored.

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. We couldn't do it, but God did.

You can gauge a country's wealth, its real wealth, by its tree cover.

Planting and growing increasing quantities of trees is the scientific solution to Earth's environmental dilemma.

I've said this so many times but there's a magic when you have a really good actor in a really good makeup.

I used to have to save my allowances to buy a quart of rubber to make a mask, and it's how I spent all my free time.

I was born in 1950 and watched science fiction and horror movies on TV and was always really fascinated by them.

Freddie Mercury taught me 3 thingsdon't take anything too seriously, have fun and always fly first class.

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.

Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.

Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.

People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

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.

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.

If you can't be proud of what you do, go and sell shoes. Do something else.

In network TV, you have to present the box before you can step outside it.

A shot is only as every as good as how well it tells the story.

I think this Occupy Wall Street thing is great. I think that is a good thing and that people need to stand up, voice their opinions, and be heard.

When judging others it's the intangibles that we often miss.

I've never ever read a script. I really must read Macbeth, because I was in it once. I got a lot of laughs in that, I can tell you.

Politicians are just Daily Mail journalists writ large, aren't they? They're always telling us what's going to happen, and we know they don't know!

I never read the scripts at all carefully and never wanted to know what was going on, because i felt that being a benevolent alien, that's the way it should be.

I like putting my money into things like food and shelter. I'm probably a bad example of an investor.

I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.

I would say that my peak was making my first million at the ripe age of 29, after the first album.

Most artists are notoriously insecure, and I fall into that category.

I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.

Dance ... is life, or becomes it, in a way that other arts cannot attain. It is not in stone, or words or tones, but in our muscles. It is a formulation of their movements.

One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that you're constantly dredging up some arcane knowledge or long-forgotten experience, rediscovering old passions and interests.

I've come to think that's what heaven is- a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.

When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.

The middle class, in the white population, encompasses a wide swath.

Today's white majority is largely silent about the race question.

I really hate those Internet freaks who take each thirty minute bundle of joy and turn it into a cult game of Where's Wally.

I guess the best way to describe that would be to connect with the fact that I came out of college just before the big Depression, and I came to New York.

I'd rather play jazz, I hate rock and roll.

But Jesus always leaves the ninety-nine to chase after the one. He always searches for the one lost coin.

We women don't care too much about getting our pictures on money as long as we can get our hands on it.

We women ought to put first things first. Why should we mind if men have their faces on the money, as long as we get our hands on it?

Who could not be moved by the sight of that poor, demoralized rabble, outwitted, outflanked, outmanoeuvered by the U.S. military? Yet, given time, I think the press will bounce back.

Many of us know more about the workings of our car than we do the reproductive cycle.