Russell Baker Quotes Page 2

“It was dramatic to watch my grandmother decapitate a turkey with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with gourmet status.”

“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.”

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

“Life is always walking up to us and saying, “Come on in, the living’s fine,” and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.”

“Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.”

“Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.”

“Long words, fat talk they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?”

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

“Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.”

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

“Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.”

“Now scarcely a week goes by without a news story about the cops swooping down on some adolescent prowler who is as skilled at breaking into computer systems as defense contractors are at breaking into the Federal budget.”

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

“People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.”

“Perhaps humans have always had this ridiculous belief in the absolute excellence of the present, this conviction that the world into which they have had the marvelous good luck to be born is the best world that ever was, the best that ever will be.”

“Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.”

“Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.”

“Schoolteachers seemed determined to persuade me that 'classic' is a synonym for 'narcotic'.”

“Sending grown-ups up the wall is one of the things adolescence is all about. A few years ago it was done with rock 'n' roll music. Now at least they can do it quietly with a home computer.”

“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.”

“Skinny women don't enjoy being told they're skinny nowadays. They enjoy telling you how they got that way, as though starvation were an achievement.”

“Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.”

“So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can’t even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.”

“Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.”

“The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.”

“The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.”

“The dirty work at political conventions is almost always done in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.”

“The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.”

“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.”

“The sinister nature of the American soil is apparent in places like Gettysburg. Fertilize it with the blood of heros, and it brings forth a frozen-custard stand.”