Russell Baker Quotes & Sayings

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

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic ... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age. — Russell Baker

Schoolteachers seemed determined to persuade me that 'classic' is a synonym for 'narcotic'. — Russell Baker

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

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

Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases. — Russell Baker

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard. — Russell Baker

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

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. — Russell Baker

Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother. — Russell Baker

A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman. — Russell Baker

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

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. — Russell Baker

Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories
those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost — Russell Baker

We honor ambition, we reward greed, we celebrate materialism, we worship acquisitiveness, we commercialize art, we cherish success and then we bark at the young about the gentle arts of the spirit. The kids know that if we really valued learning, we would pay our teachers what we pay our lawyers and stockbrokers. If we valued art, we would not measure it by its capacity to produce profits. If we regarded literature as important, we would remove it from the celebrity sweepstakes and spend a little money on our libraries. — Russell Baker

The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth. — Russell Baker

How many more years will our educators continue to lecture us on the evils of whipping children until they bring home high grades? Year after year we listen to these fellows tell us that it is not the grade that counts but the development of the child's personality. After the lecture they go back to all the best schools and reject our children because they have C averages. — Russell Baker

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century. — Russell Baker

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

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic. — Russell Baker

It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration. — Russell Baker

A $10 million windfall? At today's prices, I'd feel almost as rich as I did one day in 1936 when I found a dime on the sidewalk and blew the whole wad on 20 Mary Jane candy bars, a box of jujubes, and a double feature. — Russell Baker

Baltimore is permissiveness. The pleasures of the flesh, the table, the bottle, and the purse are tolerated with a civilized understanding. — Russell Baker

Sending grown-ups up the wall is one of the things adolescence is all about. A few years ago it was done with rock 'n' roll music. Now at least they can do it quietly with a home computer. — Russell Baker

It is safest to shut up and pay, which is what I shall eventually do, though I shall hate having to sell the children. — Russell Baker

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. — Russell Baker

The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality. — Russell Baker

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. — Russell Baker

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

It was dramatic to watch my grandmother decapitate a turkey with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with gourmet status. — Russell Baker

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? — Russell Baker

Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating. — Russell Baker

After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches. — 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

New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian. — Russell Baker

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy. — Russell Baker

Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T. — Russell Baker

Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were. — Russell Baker

Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used. — Russell Baker

Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they'll be playing on oriental rugs. — Russell Baker

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity. — Russell Baker

Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear. — Russell Baker

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. — Russell Baker

The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings. — Russell Baker

Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green. — Russell Baker

There was scarcely a woman alive, it seemed, who could resist the urge to haul men down onto beds, car seats, kitchen floors, dining-room tables, park grass, parlor sofas, or packing crates, entwine warm thighs around them, and pant in ecstasy. — Russell Baker

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

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

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

Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes. — Russell Baker

The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much. — Russell Baker

People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately. — Russell Baker

It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent. — Russell Baker

People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure. — 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

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

Serious journalism need not be solemn. — Russell Baker

When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond. — Russell Baker

What sweeter words can fall on the human ear? It's going to be May all week long. — 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

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

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. — Russell Baker

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. — Russell Baker

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. — Russell Baker

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 twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky. — Russell Baker

Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism. — Russell Baker

A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul. — Russell Baker

The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs. — Russell Baker

There are no liberals behind steering wheels. — Russell Baker

Ireland really is my problem; the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is — Russell Baker

I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour ... and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can't even understand, and which you can't even buy any place so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day ... — Russell Baker

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product. — Russell Baker

In America nothing dies easier than tradition. — Russell Baker

Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it. — Russell Baker

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. — Russell Baker

Unpleasant questions are being raised about Mother's Day. Is this day necessary? ... Isn't it bad public policy? ... No politician with half his senses, which a majority of politicians have, is likely to vote for its abolition, however. As a class, mothers are tender and loving, but as a voting bloc they would not hesitate for an instant to pull the seat out from under any Congressman who suggests that Mother is not entitled to a box of chocolates each year in the middle of May. — 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

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it. — Russell Baker

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. — Russell Baker

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins. — Russell Baker

The sinister nature of the American soil is apparent in places like Gettysburg. Fertilize it with the blood of heros, and it brings forth a frozen-custard stand. — 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

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it. — 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

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

Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated the lesson of history. — Russell Baker

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises. — Russell Baker

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

In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved. — Russell Baker

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

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

Now scarcely a week goes by without a news story about the cops swooping down on some adolescent prowler who is as skilled at breaking into computer systems as defense contractors are at breaking into the Federal budget. — 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

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. — Russell Baker

You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart. — Russell Baker

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars. — Russell Baker

I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families
sometimes into no family at all. When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much. — Russell Baker

Americans like fat books and thin women. — Russell Baker

It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom. — Russell Baker

There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living. — Russell Baker