Russell Baker Quotes
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.
Industrial-strength foolishness sets in-in males, at least-at about the age of 18. This is why the military prefers males in the 18-to-25-year-old range when there's combat to be done.
When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.
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.
Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.
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.
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.
A person whose job is deep thinking about atomic war would no more call a 'megadeath' a 'million corpses' than an embalmer would refer to a 'loved one' as a 'stiff.'
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.
The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.
Baltimore is permissiveness. The pleasures of the flesh, the table, the bottle, and the purse are tolerated with a civilized understanding.
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.
Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
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.
The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.
It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.
Schoolteachers seemed determined to persuade me that 'classic' is a synonym for 'narcotic'.
Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they'll be playing on oriental rugs.
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....
Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.
Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.
It is safest to shut up and pay, which is what I shall eventually do, though I shall hate having to sell the children.
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?
Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.
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.
Sending grown-ups up the wall is one of the things adolescence is all about. A few years ago it was done with rock 'n' roll music. Now at least they can do it quietly with a home computer.
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.
The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.
A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.
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.
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
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.
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.
Ireland really is my problem; the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is
Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime and should be taken in small doses.
When you're the only pea in the pod your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.
