Russell Baker Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

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 $20 or $30 billion dollars and, vroom!

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
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.

Russell Baker
Of all the people expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing deadlines to trample him flat. Broadcasting the contents of empty minds is what most of us do most of the time, and nobody more relentlessly than I.

Russell Baker
We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a refrigerator into a fifth floor walk-up.

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
The letter is written in the tongue of the Think Tanks, a language more difficult to master than Basque or Navaho and spoken only where strategic thinkers clump together in Institutes.

Russell Baker
Progress is what people who are planning to do something terrible almost always justify themselves on the grounds of.

Russell Baker
I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.

Russell Baker
No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat.
The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.

Russell Baker
Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history."

Russell Baker
As in some primitive ritual, we all agree — candidates and onlookers — to pretend we are involved in a debate, although the real exercise is a test of style and manners. Which of the competitors can better execute the intricate maneuvers prescribed by a largely irrelevant ritual?

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

Russell Baker
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.

Russell Baker
Only a fool expects the authorities to tell him what the news is.

Russell Baker
A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab twenty miles out of town to reach it.

Russell Baker
One snow in a winter is happiness. Two snows are too many. Three snows are a penance visited on cities that are unjust.

Russell Baker
Heroes are pretty well all washed up in America these days.

Russell Baker
This may be why New Yorkers instinctively avoid making eye contact with each other in crowded places, why they "look right through you," as dismayed visitors often complain. They are not looking right through you at all; they are discreetly avoiding an intrusion into your space. They sense the danger in a place where a one-degree temperature rise can mean an explosion.

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

Russell Baker
Never try to joke with young people because it'll just confirm their suspicion that old people are crazy.

Russell Baker
A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems than you have to.

Russell Baker
Of all the people insistently expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing headlines to trample him flat.

Russell Baker
Long words, fat talk — they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?

Russell Baker
Surely any society that permits the substitution of 'kwik' for 'quick' and 'e.z.' for 'easy' does not deserve Shakespeare, Eliot or Michener.
On the language of advertising

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

Russell Baker
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.

Russell Baker
I am unclear what a "role model" is, but those who used the term seemed to be saying that teachers are people children tend to emulate. In any event, many Miamians must have thought their children would become homosexual if subjected to homosexual teachers.
That prompted me to ponder teachers I haven't seen, and scarcely thought about, for decades, and for the first time I reflected on how their sex lives had affected my own. My first thought was that it was curious, perhaps perverse, that I have not turned out to be a spinster.

Russell Baker
Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.

Russell Baker