Russell Baker Quotes
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.
The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
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.
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.
A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.
It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.
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.
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
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.
In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.
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.
The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.
Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
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.
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.
New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.
Anything that isn't opposed by about 40 percent of humanity is either an evil business or so unimportant that it simply doesn't matter.
The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.
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.
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.
