Russell Baker Quotes

• California’s power to cloud men’s minds must never be forgot.Under its spell we submitted for eight years to the governance of Ronald Reagan, who had trouble distinguishing history from old movie plots.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

• What is it about sociology that instantly bogs us down in fens of jargon?

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

• It’s a glorious time to be an American but the glories come at you so relentlessly, so multitudinously, that they will finish you off unless you ration the intake. Nikita Kruschev, poor dolt, once said the Soviet Union  Would bury us. He didn’t know that, left alone, we would bury ourselves under our own riches.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Materialism

• A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man’s pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Sensitive, Praising

• A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Playwright, Mark

• Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feel Good, Hands

• 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.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Self

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, Man

• 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

  Topics in Victory

• Anything that isn’t opposed by about 40 percent of humanity is either an evil business or so unimportant that it simply doesn’t matter.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Humanity

• Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Expected

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Day, Change

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Clear, Election

• It’s good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Soul

• Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Journalism, Theory

• Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing

• Listen once in a while. It’s amazing what you can hear.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Amazing

• Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Humor

  Tags in People

• Roosevelt’s declaration that Americans had ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’ was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Fear

  Tags in American

• 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.

  Russell Baker

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Television, Comedy

Russell Baker (66)

Birth:	14th August, 1925
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Writer

About

Russell Wayne Baker is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer known for his satirical commentary and self-critical prose, as well as for his autobiography, Growing Up.

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Today's Anniversary - 6th October

Births

• 1914 - Thor Heyerdahl
• 1918 - Abraham Robinson
• 1942 - Britt Ekland
• 1973 - Rebecca Lobo
• 1930 - Richie Benaud

Deaths

• 2000 - William Bundy
• 1949 - Robert Wilson Lynd
• 1947 - Samuel Hoffenstein
• 1969 - Walter Hagen
• 1898 - Alfred, Lord Tennyson