Quote

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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Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Moon
Infuriates
Possibility
Trite
Impossible
Indulging
Show
Landing
Jobs
Bores
Science
Reduce
Shows
Obsession
Men
Eventually

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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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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.
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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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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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You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there's a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.
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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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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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Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.
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Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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What sweeter words can fall on the human ear? It's going to be May all week long.
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Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.
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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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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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In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.
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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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