Russell Baker Quotes
-
Serious journalism need not be solemn.
-
It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
-
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
-
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.
-
A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
-
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.
-
Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.
-
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 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
-
Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
-
Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
-
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.