Popular

Browse Popular Topics

Quotes by Russell Baker

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
A new star with a tremendous national appeal, the skill of a consummate showman.
– Russell Baker
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
Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
– Russell Baker
Americans like fat books and thin women.
– Russell Baker
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
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
Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
– Russell Baker
Disguises thinner than a Chicago stripteaser's work clothes.
– Russell Baker
Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
– Russell Baker
I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
– Russell Baker
I was converted from fool when my spine was somewhat reorganized. What amazed me was how fast a perfectly robust man looking forward to nothing more terminal than a night in Toledo can cease being alive once he pulls the dreamboat out of the driveway.
– Russell Baker
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
– Russell Baker
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
It was dramatic to watch my grandmother decapitate a turkey with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with gourmet status.
– Russell Baker
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.
– Russell Baker
Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.
– Russell Baker
Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
– Russell Baker
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
– Russell Baker
People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.
– Russell Baker
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
– Russell Baker
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
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
Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
– Russell Baker
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
– Russell Baker
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
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.
– Russell Baker
The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
– Russell Baker
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
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
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
– Russell Baker
You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
– Russell Baker
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
Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperatelly? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.
– Russell Baker
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
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
Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.
– Russell Baker
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
The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.
– Russell Baker
Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.
– Russell Baker
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
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
Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.
– Russell Baker
Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.
– Russell Baker
Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.
– Russell Baker
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
Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.
– Russell Baker
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
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.
– Russell Baker
A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.
– Russell Baker