Russell Baker Quotes (44 Quotes)

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.

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

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.

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

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

Those people who taught Hubert Humphrey a lesson will still be enjoying the Nixon Supreme Court when Tricia and Julie begin to find silver threads among the gold and the black.

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.

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.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

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.

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

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.

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

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

Inanimate objects are classed scientifically into three major categories those that don't work, those that break down and those that don't get lost.

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

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

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do Back off and take its picture.

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.

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.

Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.

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.

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.

A new star with a tremendous national appeal, the skill of a consummate showman.

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

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

Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

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

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

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.

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.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

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.

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

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.

Disguises thinner than a Chicago stripteaser's work clothes.

In today's highly complex society it takes years of training in rationalization, accommodation and compromise to qualify for the good jobs with the really big payoffs you need to retain a first-rate psychiatrist in today's world.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

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.

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.