"Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost."
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Quote collection
Russell Baker quotes (page 2 of 7)
139 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families--sometimes into no family at all. When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much."
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"Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear."
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"The sinister nature of the American soil is apparent in places like Gettysburg. Fertilize it with the blood of heros, and it brings forth a frozen-custard stand."
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"In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard."
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"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."
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"People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure."
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"It was dramatic to watch my grandmother decapitate a turkey with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with gourmet status."
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"Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism."
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"Serious journalism need not be solemn."
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"When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools."
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"The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction."
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"Of all the people 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 deadlines to trample him flat. Broadcasting the contents of empty minds is what most of us do most of the time, and nobody more relentlessly than I."
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"Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses."
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"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."
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"Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity."
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"The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him."
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"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."
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"Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward."
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"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."
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