"An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong."
"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."
3 likes
Source: Russell Baker (2014). “So This is Depravity”, p.75, Diversion Books
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Russell Baker
"The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars."
"Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of."
"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things."
"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."
"The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist."