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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.

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
Shall
Though
Hate
Safest
Children
Shut
Sell
Eventually
Sells
Pay

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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 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.
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I've had an unhappy life, thank God.
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The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.
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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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There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.
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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.
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Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
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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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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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Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
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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.
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Of all the people expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing deadlines to trample him flat. Broadcasting the contents of empty minds is what most of us do most of the time, and nobody more relentlessly than I.
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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 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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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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The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.
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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.
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Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.
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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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