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

More quotes by Russell Baker

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Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.
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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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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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Notice, for example, that people who talk about the joys of childhood are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.
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What sweeter words can fall on the human ear? It's going to be May all week long.
Russell Baker
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Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.
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There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicians' advise not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.
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.
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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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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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Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
Russell Baker
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Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
Russell Baker
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I've had an unhappy life, thank God.
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
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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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Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Russell Baker
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Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.
Russell Baker