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It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.

Russell Baker

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Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Made
Correspondent
Elizabeth
Queen
Queens
Foreign

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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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Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.
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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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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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Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
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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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The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.
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A person whose job is deep thinking about atomic war would no more call a 'megadeath' a 'million corpses' than an embalmer would refer to a 'loved one' as a 'stiff.'
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It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.
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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.
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New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
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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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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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Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.
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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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You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
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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.
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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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In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
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