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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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There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicians' advise not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.
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A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.
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You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
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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.
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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 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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Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.
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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.
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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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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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Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated the lesson of history.
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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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It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.
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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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There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.
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A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.
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It is safest to shut up and pay, which is what I shall eventually do, though I shall hate having to sell the children.
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Sending grown-ups up the wall is one of the things adolescence is all about. A few years ago it was done with rock 'n' roll music. Now at least they can do it quietly with a home computer.
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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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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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