Russell Baker

“My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“In America nothing dies easier than tradition.”

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

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

“One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning and hanging were Christian things to do…”

“We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a refrigerator into a fifth floor walk-up.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“It's always seemed odd to me that after a group of terrorists commits a vile and odious deed they rush messages to the public to claim credit for it.”

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

“Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.”

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

“It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.”

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

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