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" 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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life. "

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

" The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins. "

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

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

" Serious journalism need not be solemn. "

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

" The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him. "

" 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

" Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost. "

" Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were. "

Russell Baker

Age

Modest

" 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. "

" In America nothing dies easier than tradition. "

" In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses. "

" Americans like fat books and thin women. "

" 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. "

" Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. "

" Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism. "

Russell Baker

Journalism

Politics

" 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. "