Russell Baker Quotes

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Russell Baker

Profession : Journalist

Birth : August 14, 1925

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.

Russell Baker

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

Russell Baker

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

Russell Baker

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

Russell Baker

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

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

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

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

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

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

Russell Baker

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

Russell Baker

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

Russell Baker

Americans like fat books and thin women.

Russell Baker

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

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

A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.

Russell Baker

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

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

American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.

Russell Baker

Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

Russell Baker