Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Sunday
Church
Group
Related Quotes:
" Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism. "
Russell Baker
Journalism
More
Politics
" It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom. "
Russell Baker
White
Wine
Today
" 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
Will
Poetry
Airport
" 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
Politics
Rest
World
" 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. "
Russell Baker
Comedy
Situation
Television
" 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
Way
Born
Grandmother
" It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic. "
Russell Baker
Seems
Life
Law
" 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
Odd
Credit
Always
" You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart. "
Russell Baker
Heart
Verse
Light
" 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
Know
Parents
Children
" 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
Shot
Say
Need
" Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear. "
Russell Baker
You
Once
Hear
" 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
Three
Time
Story
" 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
Information
Best
" The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him. "
Russell Baker
Resist
Objects
Defeat
" Americans like fat books and thin women. "
Russell Baker
Women
Fat
Books
" 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
Only
Never
Writer
" 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
Writing
Media
Pen
" It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration. "
Russell Baker
Like
Start
Crisis
" 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
Fear
Nothing
Rhetoric
" People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure. "
Russell Baker
Know
People
Out
" Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder. "
Russell Baker
Humor
People
Small
" When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools. "
Russell Baker
People
Fools
Car
" Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity. "
Russell Baker
Hazardous
Verses
Your
" 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
World
Myself
Like
" Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know. "
Russell Baker
Change
Said
Republican
" 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
Break
Work
Three
" Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy. "
Russell Baker
Think
War
Work
" Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life. "
Russell Baker
Life
American
Noise
" 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
Newspaper
Women
Dreams