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Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

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
American
Part
Life
Nonstop
Background
Backgrounds
Journalism
Noise

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Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.
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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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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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You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.
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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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It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.
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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
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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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The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.
Russell Baker
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Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother.
Russell Baker
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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 are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
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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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