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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.

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
Good
Carrie
Modest
Birthday
Journalist
Plenty
Rereading
Knew
Happily
Age
Journalists
Back
Carries

More quotes by Russell Baker

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Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.
Russell Baker
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You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there's a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.
Russell Baker
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There is no business like show business, Irving Berlin once proclaimed, and thirty years ago he may have been right, but not anymore. Nowadays almost every business is like show business, including politics, which has become more like show business than show business is.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.'
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.
Russell Baker
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Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker