Russell Baker

Russell Baker

30 quotes

The American writer and satirist Russell Baker is someone whose pithy observations have become part of everyday conversation. With equal ease, Russell Baker moved between Business and Poetry, finding connections others missed. Our collection holds 36 quotes from Russell Baker, each offering a different angle on Business, Poetry, Age, War, and Politics. Among their most shared lines: "Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear."

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

— Russell Baker

Car

All Quotes by 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

Age

“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

Society

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

— Russell Baker

Humor

“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

Alone

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

— Russell Baker

History

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

— Russell Baker

Amazing

“Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.”

— Russell Baker

Poetry

“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

Politics

“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

Change

“Americans like fat books and thin women.”

— Russell Baker

Women

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

— Russell Baker

Car

“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.”

— Russell Baker

Death

“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

Poetry

“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

Car

“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

Poetry

“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

Best

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

— Russell Baker

Business

“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

Business

“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

Business

“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

Age