Russell Baker Quotes
-
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.
-
Ireland really is my problem; the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is
-
Serious journalism need not be solemn.
-
The lobbies of the new hotels and the Pan American Building exhale a chill as from the unopened Pharaonic tombs... And in their marble labyrinths there is an evil presence that hates warmth and sunlight.
-
What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.
-
The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.
-
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.
-
Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
-
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.
-
It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
-
Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way.
-
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
-
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.
-
Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.
-
Long words, fat talk they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?
-
Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.
-
In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
-
There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicians' advise not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.