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It seems to be a law of American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
Russell Baker
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Never try to joke with young people because it'll just confirm their suspicion that old people are crazy.
Russell Baker
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
Russell Baker
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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
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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
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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
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The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.
Russell Baker
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What Einstein was to physics, what Babe Ruth was to home runs, what Emily Post was to table manners—that's what Edward G. Robinson was to dying like a dirty rat.
Russell Baker
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In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like General Eisenhower. This is probably because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, especially in politics, but comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is as commonplace as jogging.
Russell Baker
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Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.
Russell Baker
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In televisionland we are all sophisticated enough now to realize that every statistic has an equal and opposite statistic somewhere in the universe. It is not a candidate's favorite statistic per se that engages us, but the assurance with which he can use it.
Russell Baker
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While it is very sturdy of comfortable men to point out that life is unfair, the people it is unfair to are not apt to be morally or philosophically elevated by the announcement.
If you are going to preach that unfairness is inescapable for some, good sense suggests that you also accept the inevitability of beastly behavior by people who have to carry the burden.
Russell Baker
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Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Russell Baker
Born:
August 14, 1925
Died:
January 21, 2019
(aged 93)
Bio:
Russell Wayne Baker was an American writer known for his satirical commentary and self-critical prose, as well as for his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Growing Up.
Known for:
Growing Up (1982)
Russell Baker's Book of American Humor (1993)
So This is Depravity (1973)
Norton Book of Light Verse (1986)
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