Quote

Serious journalism need not be solemn.

Russell Baker

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Solemn
Journalism
Serious
Need
Needs

More quotes by Russell Baker

Image
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
Image
Long words, fat talk they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?
Russell Baker
Image
What sweeter words can fall on the human ear? It's going to be May all week long.
Russell Baker
Image
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
Image
Life is always walking up to us and saying, Come on in, the living's fine, and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.
Russell Baker
Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.
Russell Baker
Image
Ireland really is my problem the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is
Russell Baker
Image
A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.
Russell Baker
Image
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
Image
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
Russell Baker
Image
Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
Russell Baker
Image
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
Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.
Russell Baker
Image
The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.
Russell Baker
Image
The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him.
Russell Baker
Image
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
Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.
Russell Baker