Words matter. These are the best Russell Baker Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Serious journalism need not be solemn.
Americans like fat books and thin women.
Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.
In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers’ own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.
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.
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.
American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.
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.
The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.
Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.
You can’t enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I’ve been in the neighborhood.
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.
Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
Like all young reporters – brilliant or hopelessly incompetent – I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits – the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.
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.
When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
Anything that isn’t opposed by about 40 percent of humanity is either an evil business or so unimportant that it simply doesn’t matter.
Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.
Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.
It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible – cowards and fools.
People who say you’re just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.
It’s good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly.
Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.
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.
The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.
Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn’t know.
Live by publicity, you’ll probably die by publicity.
