Russell Baker - Quodid

About

Picture of Russell Baker

Russell Wayne Baker (August 14, 1925 – January 21, 2019) was an American journalist, narrator, writer of Pulitzer Prize-winning satirical commentary and self-critical prose, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Growing Up (1982). He was a columnist for The New York Times for 36 years, and hosted eleven seasons of the PBS show Masterpiece Theatre. The Forbes Media Guide Five Hundred, 1994 stated: "Baker, thanks to his singular gift of treating serious, even tragic events and trends with gentle humor, has become an American institution."

Quotes from 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

progress change conservatism

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

There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicans' advice not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.

—Russell Baker

politics speech media reporting politicians

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

—Russell Baker

enjoyment inclusion exclusion

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

—Russell Baker

man defeat objects

How come it's a "subsidy" when Pan American Airlines asks the government for a hundred million dollars to keep flying, but when people ask for considerably less to keep going, it is a federal handout?

—Russell Baker

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

—Russell Baker

science work object lost

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor, magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire, and 20 or 30 billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

—Russell Baker

I was to learn later that in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

—Russell Baker

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

—Russell Baker

enjoyment suffering summer

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.

—Russell Baker

cars efficiency

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

—Russell Baker

sadness misery company

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

—Russell Baker

perspective age