“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.”
Smile
“A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.”
HistoryAll Quotes by 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.”
Best“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”
Nature“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.”
Business“Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.”
Politics“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.”
Death“Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.”
Business“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.”
Home“Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.”
Poetry“Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.”
Society“Americans like fat books and thin women.”
Women“When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.”
Car“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.”
Poetry“Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.”
Humor“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.”
Dreams“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.”
Age“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.”
Age“Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.”
Fear“Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.”
Parenting“Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.”
Science