Best Russell Baker Quotes & Sayings

The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don't do it. I have been out there. It is a mess. — Russell Baker

The dirty work at political conventions is almost always done in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb. — 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

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

Though Americans talk a good deal about the virtue of being serious, they generally prefer people who are solemn over people who are serious. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like General Eisenhower. This is probably because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, especially in politics, but comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is as commonplace as jogging. — Russell Baker

Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys. — Russell Baker

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. — 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

You could live without the opera singer, but not without the services of the baker. On this ground you might say that the baker performs a greater service; but no lover of music would agree. — Bertrand Russell

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

Goat cheese ... produced a bizarre eating era when sensible people insisted that this miserable cheese produced by these miserable creatures reared on miserable hardscrabble earth was actually superior to the magnificent creamy cheeses of the noblest dairy animals bred in the richest green valleys of the earth. — Russell Baker

The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him. — Russell Baker

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

When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools. — Russell Baker

Serious journalism need not be solemn. — 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's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living. — Russell Baker

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. — Russell Baker

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. — Russell Baker

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. — Russell Baker

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems. — 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

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

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

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

Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder. — 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

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

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

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

In America nothing dies easier than tradition. — Russell Baker

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

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

There are no liberals behind steering wheels. — 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

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

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

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

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

When speaking aloud, you punctuate constantly - with body language.
Your listener hears commas, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks as you shout, whisper, pause, wave your arms, roll your eyes, wrinkle your brow.
In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear the way you want to be heard. — 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