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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

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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
Newspapers
Presses
Press
Authority
Numbered
Days
Authorities
American
Assured
Many
Blues
Good
Ruins

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Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
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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.
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Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
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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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The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.
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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.
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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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The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.
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When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.
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Serious journalism need not be solemn.
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Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way.
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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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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.
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The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
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The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln.
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The people who say: 'You are what you eat' have always seemed addled to me. In my opinion, you are what you think, and if you don't think, you can eat all the meat in Kansas City and still be nothing but a vegetable.
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