1
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
2
Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.Russell Baker
3
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.Russell Baker
4
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.Russell Baker
5
We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a refrigerator into a fifth floor walk-up.Russell Baker
6
One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning and hanging were Christian things to do… .Russell Baker
7
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
8
After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.Russell Baker
9
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
10
New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.Russell Baker
11
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned but give him a little metal a few chemicals some wire and 20 or 30 billion dollars and vroom! There he is up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.Russell Baker
12
I've had an unhappy life thank God.Russell Baker
13
When you're the only pea in the pod your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.Russell Baker
14
Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime and should be taken in small doses.Russell Baker
15
When compelled to cook I produce a meal that would make a sword swallower gag.Russell Baker
16
Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.Russell Baker
17
Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.Russell Baker
18
Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.Russell Baker
19
Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.Russell Baker
20
Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.Russell Baker
21
Americans like fat books and thin women.Russell Baker
22
Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.Russell Baker
23
There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.Russell Baker
24
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
25
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.Russell Baker
26
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.Russell Baker
27
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.Russell Baker
28
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.Russell Baker
29
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.Russell Baker
30
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.Russell Baker
31
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.Russell Baker