Russell Baker Quotes - Page 3

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• It is safest to shut up and pay, which is what I shall eventually do, though I shall hate having to sell the children.

  Russell Baker

  Children, Hate, Pay

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Pieces, Rhetoric, Glorious

  5 Copy quote

• I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour... and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can't even understand, and which you can't even buy any place so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day.

  Russell Baker

  Science, Rocks, Space

  Russell Baker (1983). “So This Is Depravity”, Pocket Books

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Passion, Self Confidence, Long

  Russell Baker (1983). “So This Is Depravity”, Pocket Books

  4 Copy quote

• Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.

  Russell Baker

  Men, Goal, Inanimate Objects

  "The Plot Against People," The New York Times, June 18, 1968.

  6 Copy quote

• One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning and hanging were Christian things to do.

  Russell Baker

  Christian, Smell, Hypocrisy

  4 Copy quote

• I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families--sometimes into no family at all. When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.

  Russell Baker

  Family, Children, Confused

  Russell Baker, William Knowlton Zinsser (1998). “Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir”, p.26, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  14 Copy quote

• Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.

  Russell Baker

  School, Yale, Ivy

  8 Copy quote

• I've had an unhappy life, thank God.

  Russell Baker

  Adversity, Happy Life, Thank God

  5 Copy quote

• It's always seemed odd to me that after a group of terrorists commits a vile and odious deed they rush messages to the public to claim credit for it.

  Russell Baker

  Credit, Deeds, Messages

  5 Copy quote

• It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.

  Russell Baker

  Queens, Queen Elizabeth, Made

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Who I Am, Clothes

  Russell Baker (1983). “So This Is Depravity”, Pocket Books

  6 Copy quote

• Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.

  Russell Baker

  Publicity, Live By, Dies

  9 Copy quote

• Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.

  Russell Baker

  Children, Reality, People

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  America, Humanity, Events

  7 Copy quote

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

  Russell Baker

  Clever, Two, Car

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Loss, Airports, Littles

  11 Copy quote

• The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln.

  Russell Baker

  Book, Reading, Ambition

  4 Copy quote

• Goat cheese... produced a bizarre eating era when sensible people insisted that this miserable cheese produced by these miserable creatures reared on miserable hardscrabble earth was actually superior to the magnificent creamy cheeses of the noblest dairy animals bred in the richest green valleys of the earth.

  Russell Baker

  Food, Animal, People

  7 Copy quote

• The French fried potato has become an inescapable horror in almost every public eating place in the country. 'French fries', say the menus, but they are not French fries any longer. They are a furry-textured substance with the taste of plastic wood.

  Russell Baker

  Country, Food, America

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Attitude, Speak English, Long

  Russell Baker (1990). “There's a country in my cellar”, William Morrow & Company

  5 Copy quote

• Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.

  Russell Baker

  May, Solemnity, Caution

  8 Copy quote

• The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.

  Russell Baker

  Environmental, Society, Age

  4 Copy quote

• Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.

  Russell Baker

  Discovery, Class, Television

  Russell Baker (1991). “There's a Country in My Cellar”, Avon Books

  8 Copy quote

• There are no liberals behind steering wheels.

  Russell Baker

  Wheels, Steering, Behinds

  Russell Baker (1992). “Poor Russell's almanac”

  4 Copy quote

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