Quote

It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.

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
Today
Noise
Nursing
Smoke
Fitting
Swashbuckling
Turned
Solemn
Newsroom
Wine
Reporters
Yesteryear
Computer
Newspaper
Databases
Free
Glass
Toiling
White
Newspapers
Watered
Young
Glasses
Reporter

More quotes by Russell Baker

Image
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.
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
I've had an unhappy life, thank God.
Russell Baker
Image
Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.
Russell Baker
Image
A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.
Russell Baker
Image
Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.
Russell Baker
Image
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
Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.
Russell Baker
Image
A person whose job is deep thinking about atomic war would no more call a 'megadeath' a 'million corpses' than an embalmer would refer to a 'loved one' as a 'stiff.'
Russell Baker
Image
Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
Russell Baker
Image
A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.
Russell Baker
Image
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Russell Baker
Image
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
Image
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.
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
Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they'll be playing on oriental rugs.
Russell Baker
Image
Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
Russell Baker
Image
The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
Russell Baker
Image
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.
Russell Baker