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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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Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Things
Terrible
Progress
Society
Peace
War
Antiwar
History
Excuse
Done
Requires
Really
Usually

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Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated the lesson of history.
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Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they'll be playing on oriental rugs.
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Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.
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Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.
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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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Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
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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.
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There was scarcely a woman alive, it seemed, who could resist the urge to haul men down onto beds, car seats, kitchen floors, dining-room tables, park grass, parlor sofas, or packing crates, entwine warm thighs around them, and pant in ecstasy.
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Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on 'canned' laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.
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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.
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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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A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.
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Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
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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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Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
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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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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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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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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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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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