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.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

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.

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

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

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

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.

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.

Dont try to make children grow up to be like you or they may do it.

Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.

New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.

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.

When compelled to cook I produce a meal that would make a sword swallower gag.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

When it comes to cars only two varieties of people are possible cowards and fools.

New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.

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 mans noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.

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.

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

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

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

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.

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.

People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.

People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.

The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this Dont do it. I have been out there. It is a mess.

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

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.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.

Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.

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.

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

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

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.

It was dramatic to watch my grandmother decapitate a turkey with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with gourmet status.

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.

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

You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there's a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

The French fried potato has become an inescapable horror in almost every public eating place in the country. French fries say the menus but they are not French fries any longer. They are a furry textured substance with the taste of plastic wood.

The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

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

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

When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.

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.

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.

Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

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

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.

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

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

Skinny women don't enjoy being told they're skinny nowadays. They enjoy telling you how they got that way, as though starvation were an achievement.