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Serious journalism need not be solemn.

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
Needs
Solemn
Journalism
Serious
Need

More quotes by Russell Baker

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I've had an unhappy life, thank God.
Russell Baker
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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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The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.
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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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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
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Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.
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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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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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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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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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
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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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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
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Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
Russell Baker
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Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.
Russell Baker
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It is safest to shut up and pay, which is what I shall eventually do, though I shall hate having to sell the children.
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 charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.
Russell Baker
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Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
Russell Baker
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Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.
Russell Baker