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Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.

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
Obstacle
Obstacles
Happiness
Reality

More quotes by Russell Baker

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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.
Russell Baker
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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
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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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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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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The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.
Russell Baker
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Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.
Russell Baker
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The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him.
Russell Baker
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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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There are no liberals behind steering wheels.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker
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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.
Russell Baker