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You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.

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
Heavy
Enjoy
Light
Heart
Verse
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More quotes by Russell Baker

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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.
Russell Baker
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Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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Serious journalism need not be solemn.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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
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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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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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
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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.
Russell Baker
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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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A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.
Russell Baker
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Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.
Russell Baker
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Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.
Russell Baker
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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
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There are no liberals behind steering wheels.
Russell Baker