"The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth."
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Quote collection
Russell Baker quotes (page 6 of 7)
139 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It's good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly."
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"Though Americans talk a good deal about the virtue of being serious, they generally prefer people who are solemn over people who are serious. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like General Eisenhower. This is probably because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, especially in politics, but comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is as commonplace as jogging."
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"Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century."
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"Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty."
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"Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used."
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"The dirty work at political conventions is almost always done in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb."
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"There are no liberals behind steering wheels."
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"Skinny women don't enjoy being told they're skinny nowadays. They enjoy telling you how they got that way, as though starvation were an achievement."
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"A $10 million windfall? At today's prices, I'd feel almost as rich as I did one day in 1936 when I found a dime on the sidewalk and blew the whole wad on 20 Mary Jane candy bars, a box of jujubes, and a double feature."
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"A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul."
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"The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they'll be playing on oriental rugs."
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"It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration."
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"Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion."
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"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."
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"Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green."
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"Unpleasant questions are being raised about Mother's Day. Is this day necessary? . . . Isn't it bad public policy? . . . No politician with half his senses, which a majority of politicians have, is likely to vote for its abolition, however. As a class, mothers are tender and loving, but as a voting bloc they would not hesitate for an instant to pull the seat out from under any Congressman who suggests that Mother is not entitled to a box of chocolates each year in the middle of May."
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