Quotes by Russell Baker

• In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
• Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
• Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
• People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
• Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
• Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
• Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.
• 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.
• Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
• In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
• 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.
• Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
• 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.
• Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
• Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
• 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.
• Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
• 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.
• In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
• People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.
• Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
• The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
• 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 goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
• When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
• You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
• What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.