Quote

After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.

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
Study
Studying
Knew
Essentially
Facts
Journalism
Two
Newspapers
Phoned
Together
Task
Stringing
Years
Endless
Cliches
Men
Tasks
Rewrite
Series
Cliche

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The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.
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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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The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.
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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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Long words, fat talk they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?
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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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The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
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Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.
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After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.
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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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Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.
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