Russell Baker Quotes
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Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
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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.
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Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
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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.
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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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You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
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The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.
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New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
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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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The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
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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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Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
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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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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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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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I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour... and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can't even understand, and which you can't even buy any place so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day.
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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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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 who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.
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A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.
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The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
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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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Unpleasant questions are being raised about Mother's Day. Is this day necessary? . . . Isn't it bad public policy? . . . No politician with half his senses, which a majority of politicians have, is likely to vote for its abolition, however. As a class, mothers are tender and loving, but as a voting bloc they would not hesitate for an instant to pull the seat out from under any Congressman who suggests that Mother is not entitled to a box of chocolates each year in the middle of May.
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Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.