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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
Ideas
Tedium
Brevity
Wit
Notion
Essence
Modern
Quality
Idea
Succumbed
More quotes by Russell Baker
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
Russell Baker
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.
Russell Baker
It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.
Russell Baker
What sweeter words can fall on the human ear? It's going to be May all week long.
Russell Baker
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.
Russell Baker
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.
Russell Baker
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?
Russell Baker
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
Russell Baker
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.
Russell Baker
I've had an unhappy life, thank God.
Russell Baker
Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.
Russell Baker
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Russell Baker
American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.
Russell Baker
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.
Russell Baker
In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
Russell Baker
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.
Russell Baker
You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
Russell Baker
Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
Russell Baker
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.
Russell Baker
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.
Russell Baker