Quotes from Russell Baker

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

American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.

Ireland really is my problem; the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is

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.

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

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.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

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.

I've had an unhappy life, thank God.

There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.

It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

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.

All politicians are humble, and seldom let you forget it. They go around the country boasting about their humility. They are proud of their humility. Many are downright arrogant about their humility and insist that it qualifies them to be President.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

Of all the people insistently expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing headlines to trample him flat.

There is no business like show business, Irving Berlin once proclaimed, and thirty years ago 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.

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