Russell Baker

Unpleasant questions are being raised about Mother's Day. Is this day necessary? . . . Isn't it bad public policy? . .…

— Russell Baker

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

— Russell Baker

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.

— Russell Baker

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

— Russell Baker

Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that…

— Russell Baker

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between…

— Russell Baker

After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task…

— Russell Baker

American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at…

— Russell Baker

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

When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.

— Russell Baker

Serious journalism need not be solemn.

— Russell Baker

Ireland really is my problem; the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is

— Russell Baker

Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

— Russell Baker

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often…

— Russell Baker

The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in…

— Russell Baker

Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.

— Russell Baker

When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be…

— Russell Baker

Goat cheese... produced a bizarre eating era when sensible people insisted that this miserable cheese produced by these miserable creatures reared on…

— Russell Baker

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

— Russell Baker

We honor ambition, we reward greed, we celebrate materialism, we worship acquisitiveness, we commercialize art, we cherish success and then we bark…

— Russell Baker

The lobbies of the new hotels and the Pan American Building exhale a chill as from the unopened Pharaonic tombs... And in…

— Russell Baker

A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump…

— 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…

— Russell Baker

Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen,…

— Russell Baker

I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000…

— Russell Baker