Russell Baker Quotes
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The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.
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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.
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Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.
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While it is very sturdy of comfortable men to point out that life is unfair, the people it is unfair to are not apt to be morally or philosophically elevated by the announcement. If you are going to preach that unfairness is inescapable for some, good sense suggests that you also accept the inevitability of beastly behavior by people who have to carry the burden.
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Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
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The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.
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The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
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When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.
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Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they'll be playing on oriental rugs.
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The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
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It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.
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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.
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People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
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When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
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Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
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Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.
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You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
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The French fried potato has become an inescapable horror in almost every public eating place in the country. 'French fries', say the menus, but they are not French fries any longer. They are a furry-textured substance with the taste of plastic wood.
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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.
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I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families--sometimes into no family at all. When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.