People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure. – 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
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
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. – Russell Baker
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it. – 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
It is fitting that yesteryear’s swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today’s solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom. – Russell Baker
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
A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man’s pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul. – 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
When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed. – Russell Baker
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
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
Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product. – Russell Baker
What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises. – Russell Baker