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" 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
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" 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
Break
Down
Work
" 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. "
Russell Baker
Doing
Nobody
Glasses
" 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
" 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
" It's good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly. "
Russell Baker
Yourself
You
Time
" People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately. "
Russell Baker
Say
Wrong
You
" 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
" It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent. "
Russell Baker
Who
Elizabeth
Foreign
" The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins. "
Russell Baker
Many
Days
Blues
" 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
" Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it. "
Russell Baker
You
Suffer
Summer
" 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
" 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
Just
Progress
Things
" Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product. "
Russell Baker
Street
Wall
Away
" 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
" 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
" Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life. "
Russell Baker
Life
American
Noise
" Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it. "
Russell Baker
Company
Longer
Misery
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it. "
Russell Baker
Grow
Parenting
You
" 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
" 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
" 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
" When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools. "
Russell Baker
People
Fools
Car
" 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
" The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs. "
Russell Baker
Business
Financial
Management
" 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
" 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
Me
Age
Modest