Quotes by Russell Baker

“But thy eternal summer shall not fade.”

“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 didnt require any.”

“People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.”

“Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that dont work, those that break down and those that get lost.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Live by publicity, youll probably die by publicity.”

“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.”

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 didnt require any.

Dont try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

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.

A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didnt have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.

We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a refrigerator into a fifth floor walk-up.

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…

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.

After that [fathers death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyones God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

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.

New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.