Quote

There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.

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
Living
Around
Going
Much
Never
Life

More quotes by Russell Baker

Image
Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
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 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
Image
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
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
A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.
Russell Baker
Image
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Russell Baker
Image
The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.
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
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.
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
Image
In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
Russell Baker
Image
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
Image
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.
Russell Baker
Image
Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.
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
Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they'll be playing on oriental rugs.
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
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.
Russell Baker
Image
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.
Russell Baker