"Baltimore is permissiveness. The pleasures of the flesh, the table, the bottle, and the purse are tolerated with a civilized understanding."
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Quote collection
Russell Baker quotes (page 7 of 7)
139 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Now scarcely a week goes by without a news story about the cops swooping down on some adolescent prowler who is as skilled at breaking into computer systems as defense contractors are at breaking into the Federal budget."
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"Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases."
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"The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality."
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"The lobbies of the new hotels and the Pan American Building exhale a chill as from the unopened Pharaonic tombs... And in their marble labyrinths there is an evil presence that hates warmth and sunlight."
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"What sweeter words can fall on the human ear? It's going to be May all week long."
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"After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches."
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"Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes."
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"Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were."
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"Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history."
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"Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life."
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"The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age."
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"Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it."
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"My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood."
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"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."
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"What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him."
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"Schoolteachers seemed determined to persuade me that 'classic' is a synonym for 'narcotic'."
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"Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it."
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"The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don't do it. I have been out there. It is a mess...."
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