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I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.

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
Admit
Refuse
Clothes
Knowing
Tell
Think
Thinking
People
Frankly

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Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
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It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.
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The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.
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The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
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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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Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.
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Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.
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There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.
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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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Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.
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Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is no business like show business, Irving Berlin once proclaimed, and thirty years ago he may have been right, but not anymore. Nowadays almost every business is like show business, including politics, which has become more like show business than show business is.
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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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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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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
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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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Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Russell Baker