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The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.

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
Essence
Modern
Quality
Idea
Succumbed
Ideas
Tedium
Brevity
Wit
Notion

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People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
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There was scarcely a woman alive, it seemed, who could resist the urge to haul men down onto beds, car seats, kitchen floors, dining-room tables, park grass, parlor sofas, or packing crates, entwine warm thighs around them, and pant in ecstasy.
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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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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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Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
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Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
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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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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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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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Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.
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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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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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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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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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I've had an unhappy life, thank God.
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Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
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Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.
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Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.
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