Quotes from Russell Baker

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

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

Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

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.

Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.

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.

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.

A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.

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.

Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.

Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

Anything that isn't opposed by about 40 percent of humanity is either an evil business or so unimportant that it simply doesn't matter.

Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.

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.

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.

Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express 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.

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.

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.

Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

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.