Famous Quotes By Russell Baker

 

1. A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.
2. Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
3. Americans like fat books and thin women.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
9. Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
13. 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.
14. Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.
15. Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.
16. Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
17. Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
18. 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.
19. Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.
20. The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.
21. Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
22. 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.
23. When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
24. 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.
25. 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.