Russell Baker Short Quotes

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Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.

Russell Baker
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

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

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

Russell Baker
What sweeter words can fall on the human ear? It's going to be May all week long.

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

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

Russell Baker
When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond.

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

Russell Baker
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.

Russell Baker
The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.

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

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
The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.

Russell Baker
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
The sinister nature of the American soil is apparent in places like Gettysburg. Fertilize it with the blood of heros, and it brings forth a frozen-custard stand.

Russell Baker
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
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
A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.

Russell Baker
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