A biography for Russell Bakerhasn’t been written yet.
“You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.”
“When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.”
“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.”
“It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.”
“The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.”
“Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.”
“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.”
“Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.”
“Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.”
“Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.”
“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.”
“A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.”
“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.”
“Serious journalism need not be solemn.”
“Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.”
“It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.”
“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.”
“Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.”
“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.”
“Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.”