Russell Baker Quotes
"Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Poetry, School)
"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
(Related: Events, Humanity, Misfortune, Pleasure, Reason, Rest, World)
"People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure."
- Russell Baker
(Related: People, Pleasure)
"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
(Related: Work)
"Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Company, Misery)
"Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Publicity)
"It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Life, American, Law)
"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
(Related: Car, Efficiency)
"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
(Related: Work)
"In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses."
- Russell Baker
(Related: America)
"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."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Poetry, Lonely, World, Years)
"Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Children, May)
"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
(Related: Age, Children, Curiosity, Parents, Want)
"Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity."
- Russell Baker
(Related: May)
"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
(Related: Poetry, Loss, Public, Will)
"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
(Related: Information, Misleading, Wrong)
"Americans like fat books and thin women."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Women, Americans, Books)
"Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Power, Summer)
"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
(Related: Church, Morals, Politicians, President)
"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."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Age, Love, Fashion)
"People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately."
- Russell Baker
(Related: People, Old, Wrong)
"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
(Related: Progress)
"The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Being, Tourists)
"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
(Related: Work, Suspicion, Writer, Writing)
"The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Goal, Defeat, Man)
"When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools."
- Russell Baker
(Related: People, Cowards, Fools)
"You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Heart, Light)
"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."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Home, Americans, Right, Trees)