Russell Baker Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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....

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.

Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

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.

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.

The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.

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.

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

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

Serious journalism need not be solemn.

The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.

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