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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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Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Years
Republican
Seventies
Never
Succeed
Failed
Like
Probably
Clearly
Inauguration
President
Six
Succeeding
Didn
Expected
Roosevelt
Change
Obama
Seventy
Might
Later
Franklin
Much
Americans
Voted

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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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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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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.
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Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
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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.
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Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.
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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.
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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.
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Sending grown-ups up the wall is one of the things adolescence is all about. A few years ago it was done with rock 'n' roll music. Now at least they can do it quietly with a home computer.
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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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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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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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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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New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
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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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The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
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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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So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
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What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.
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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