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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

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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
Home
Americans
Cockroaches
Live
Couple
Manages
Right
Seem
Yorker
Would
Grow
Premises
Like
Tree
Closets
Grows
Calls
Also
Trees
Seems
Manage

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Of all the people expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing deadlines to trample him flat. Broadcasting the contents of empty minds is what most of us do most of the time, and nobody more relentlessly than I.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
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There are no liberals behind steering wheels.
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Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
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Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.
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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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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.
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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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The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.
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Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.
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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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Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.
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It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.
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