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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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Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Talk
Utterly
Reality
Adult
Children
Notice
Always
Suppose
Time
Adults
People
Childhood
Joy
Remote
Example
Joys

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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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Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.
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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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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.
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When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
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The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.
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Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
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Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
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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.
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So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
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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.
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Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
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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.
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The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
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It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.
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