Quotes by Russell Baker

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

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

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

Education

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

Courage

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

Wisdom

Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

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

Success

Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

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

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

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

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

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

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother.

— Russell Baker

Success

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

— Russell Baker

Life

My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.

— Russell Baker

Hope

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

Wisdom

Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.

— Russell Baker

Friendship

A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.

— Russell Baker

Friendship

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

— Russell Baker

Wisdom

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

Life