Russell Baker Quotes

• California’s power to cloud men’s minds must never be forgot.Under its spell we submitted for eight years to the governance of Ronald Reagan, who had trouble distinguishing history from old movie plots.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

• What is it about sociology that instantly bogs us down in fens of jargon?

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

• It’s a glorious time to be an American but the glories come at you so relentlessly, so multitudinously, that they will finish you off unless you ration the intake. Nikita Kruschev, poor dolt, once said the Soviet Union  Would bury us. He didn’t know that, left alone, we would bury ourselves under our own riches.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Materialism

• 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

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Writer, Real, Writing
• 

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

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Children

  Tags in Like, Try, Grow

• 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

  Topics in Business

  Tags in Trouble, Office

• 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.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in War, Culture

• Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Caution

• 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.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Death

• You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there’s a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Always

• 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.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Literature

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Always, Seemed

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Thinkers, Find

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Television, Comedy

• 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

  Topics in Fear

  Tags in American

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

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Humor

  Tags in People

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

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Journalism

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Press

• The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Presidential

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fit

Russell Baker (66)

Birth:	14th August, 1925
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Writer

About

Russell Wayne Baker is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer known for his satirical commentary and self-critical prose, as well as for his autobiography, Growing Up.

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