Russell Baker quotes - page 3

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity. (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. View quote
Russell Baker
What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises. View quote
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. View quote
Russell Baker
The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist. View quote
Russell Baker
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. View quote
Russell Baker
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. View quote
Russell Baker
Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on canned laughter grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years. View quote
Russell Baker
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it. View quote
Russell Baker
Early in life, most of us probably observe an unhappy relationship between labor and wealth - to wit, the heavier the labor, the less the wealth. The man doing heavy manual work makes less than the man who makes a machine work for him, and this man makes less than the man sitting at a desk. The really rich people, the kind who go around on yachts and collect old books and new wives, do no labor at all. The economic reasons for dividing the money this way are clear enough. One, it has always been done that way; and two, it's too hard to change at this late date. But the puzzling question is why, since the money is parceled out on this principle, young people are constantly being pummeled to take up a life of labor. In any sensible world, the young would be told they could labor if they wanted to, but warned that if they did so it would cost them. View quote
Russell Baker
Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it. (Russell Baker)
A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems. View quote
Russell Baker
Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity. View quote
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. View quote
Russell Baker
You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart. View quote
Russell Baker
Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder. View quote
Russell Baker
It's good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly. View quote
Russell Baker
A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul. View quote
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. View quote
Russell Baker
Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product. View quote
Russell Baker
It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent. (Russell Baker)
Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism. View quote
Russell Baker
It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration. View quote
Russell Baker
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. View quote
Russell Baker
Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes. View quote
Russell Baker