Russell Baker > Quotes

“Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.”
― Russell Baker

“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

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

“When speaking aloud, you punctuate constantly — with body language.

Your listener hears commas, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks as you shout, whisper, pause, wave your arms, roll your eyes, wrinkle your brow.

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear the way you want to be heard.”
― Russell Baker

“Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.”
― Russell Baker

“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

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

“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

“A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.”
― Russell Baker

“We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.”
― Russell Baker, Growing Up

“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”
― Russell Baker

“Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories -- those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost”
― Russell Baker

“The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.”
― Russell Baker, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir

“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.”
― Russell Baker

“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. If”
― Russell Baker, Growing 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…”
― Russell Baker

“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.”
― Russell Baker

“You find it so easy to be smart that you don’t bother to work very hard”
― Russell Baker, Growing Up

“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.”
― Russell Baker, So This Is Depravity and Other Observations

“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

“After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's 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.”
― Russell Baker, Growing Up

“There is no show business like show business, Irving Berlin once proclaimed, and [in 1950] he may have been right, but not anymore. Nowadays almost every business is like show business, including politics, which has become more like show business than show business is.”
― Russell Baker, So This Is Depravity and Other Observations

“Being solemn has almost nothing to do with being serious, but on the other hand, you can't go on being adolescent forever, unless you are in the performing arts, and anyhow most people can't tell the difference. In fact, though Americans talk a great deal about the virtue of being serious, they generally prefer people who are solemn over people who are serious. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn. This is probably because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, especially in politics, but comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is as commonplace as jogging. Jogging is solemn. Poker is serious. Once you grasp that distinction, you are on your way to enlightenment.”
― Russell Baker, So This Is Depravity and Other Observations

“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.”
― Russell Baker

“One Thanksgiving she burned herself badly when, running up from the cellar over with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on the stairs and tumbled back down, ending at the bottom in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and battered turkey. Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind whether people liked it or not. She ran.”
― Russell Baker, Growing Up

“forsan et haec olim meminisse invabit.” After great difficulty and with much help from the teacher I had worked this out to mean, “Someday we shall recall these trials with pleasure.”
― Russell Baker, Growing Up

“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, Growing Up

“The changeover from knickers to long pants was the ritual recognition that a boy had reached adolescence, or “the awkward age,” as everybody called it. The “teenager,” like the atomic bomb, was still uninvented, and there were few concessions to adolescence, but the change to long pants was a ritual of recognition.”
― Russell Baker, Growing Up

“One family close by produced children in such volume that the parents ran out of names and began giving them numbers.”
― Russell Baker, Growing Up