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It's always seemed odd to me that after a group of terrorists commits a vile and odious deed they rush messages to the public to claim credit for it.
Russell Baker -
It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.
Russell Baker
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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 -
Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
Russell Baker -
Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.
Russell Baker -
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.
Russell Baker -
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
Russell Baker -
Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
Russell Baker
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Serious journalism need not be solemn.
Russell Baker -
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.
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 -
Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
Russell Baker -
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.
Russell Baker -
A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.
Russell Baker
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Grass is the least rewarding of all status symbols... The grass does nothing but drink money, exhaust energies, crush spirits, destroy sleep, create tensions and interfere with the watching of baseball games, and sprout insolent signs ordering humans to keep off it.
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 -
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
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 -
I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.
Russell Baker -
Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.
Russell Baker
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Skinny women don't enjoy being told they're skinny nowadays. They enjoy telling you how they got that way, as though starvation were an achievement.
Russell Baker -
Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
Russell Baker -
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Russell Baker -
Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
Russell Baker