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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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Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Never
Fine
Fancy
Intellectuals
Dangerous
League
Inclined
Full
Possibly
Elite
Rich
Hot
Harvard
Ivy
Fear
Schools
Elites
Distinctions
School
Weather
Voters
Supper
Matter
Stuck
Distinction
Yale
Make
Gets
Rarely
Loathe

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Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
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Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
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Serious journalism need not be solemn.
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Goat cheese... produced a bizarre eating era when sensible people insisted that this miserable cheese produced by these miserable creatures reared on miserable hardscrabble earth was actually superior to the magnificent creamy cheeses of the noblest dairy animals bred in the richest green valleys of the earth.
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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.
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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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Skinny women don't enjoy being told they're skinny nowadays. They enjoy telling you how they got that way, as though starvation were an achievement.
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Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.
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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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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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Ireland really is my problem the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is
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My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.
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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.
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Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
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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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There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicians' advise not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.
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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.
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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.
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A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.
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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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