Quote

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.

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
Problem
Prescriptions
Best
Solved
Creates
Solve
Problems
Happy
Living
Two
Prescription

More quotes by Russell Baker

Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.
Russell Baker
Image
New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
Russell Baker
Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
Ireland really is my problem the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is
Russell Baker
Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
Serious journalism need not be solemn.
Russell Baker
Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.
Russell Baker
Image
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
Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.
Russell Baker
Image
The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.
Russell Baker
Image
Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Russell Baker
Image
The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
Russell Baker
Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.
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
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.
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