Russell Baker Quotes
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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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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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Goat cheese... produced a bizarre eating era when sensible people insisted that this miserable cheese produced by these miserable creatures reared on miserable hardscrabble earth was actually superior to the magnificent creamy cheeses of the noblest dairy animals bred in the richest green valleys of the earth.
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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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Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.
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Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.
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A $10 million windfall? At today's prices, I'd feel almost as rich as I did one day in 1936 when I found a dime on the sidewalk and blew the whole wad on 20 Mary Jane candy bars, a box of jujubes, and a double feature.
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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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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.
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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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There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.
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Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
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A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.
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A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.
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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.'
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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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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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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.
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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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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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The people who say: 'You are what you eat' have always seemed addled to me. In my opinion, you are what you think, and if you don't think, you can eat all the meat in Kansas City and still be nothing but a vegetable.
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It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.
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Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.
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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.