Top 70 Russell Baker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.”

— Russell Baker

2. “A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.”

— Russell Baker

3. “The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don’t do it. I have been out there. It is a mess.”

— Russell Baker

4. “I’ve had an unhappy life, thank God.”

— Russell Baker

5. “Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.”

— Russell Baker

6. “Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.”

— Russell Baker

7. “Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.”

— Russell Baker

8. “I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.”

— Russell Baker

9. “Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.”

— Russell Baker

10. “Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.”

— Russell Baker

11. “Life seemed to be an educator’s practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.”

— Russell Baker

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

12. “When you’re the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.”

— Russell Baker

13. “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

14. “The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.”

— Russell Baker

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

— Russell Baker

16. “The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.”

— Russell Baker

17. “There are no liberals behind steering wheels.”

— Russell Baker

18. “Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.”

— Russell Baker

19. “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

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

— Russell Baker

21. “Life is always walking up to us and saying, “Come on in, the living’s fine,” and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.”

— Russell Baker

22. “Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.”

— Russell Baker

23. “Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.”

— Russell Baker

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

— Russell Baker

25. “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

26. “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

27. “You can’t enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.”

— Russell Baker

28. “Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.”

— Russell Baker

29. “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

30. “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

31. “One Thanksgiving she burned herself badly when, running up from the cellar over with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on the stairs and tumbled back down, ending at the bottom in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and battered turkey. Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind whether people liked it or not. She ran.”

— Russell Baker

32. “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

33. “You find it so easy to be smart that you don’t bother to work very hard.”

— Russell Baker

34. “The dirty work at political conventions is almost always done in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.”

— Russell Baker

35. “Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.”

— Russell Baker

36. “We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.”

— Russell Baker

37. “Baltimore is permissiveness. The pleasures of the flesh, the table, the bottle, and the purse are tolerated with a civilized understanding.”

— Russell Baker

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

— Russell Baker

39. “The people who say: ‘You are what you eat’ have always seemed addled to me. In my opinion, you are what you think, and if you don’t think, you can eat all the meat in Kansas City and still be nothing but a vegetable.”

— Russell Baker

40. “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 man’s noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.”

— Russell Baker

41. “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.”

— Russell Baker

42. “The biographer’s problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer’s problem is that he knows too much.”

— Russell Baker

43. “I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families – sometimes into no family at all. When you’re the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.”

— Russell Baker

44. “Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.”

— Russell Baker

45. “A person whose job is deep thinking about atomic war would no more call a ‘megadeath’ a ‘million corpses’ than an embalmer would refer to a ‘loved one’ as a ‘stiff.’”

— Russell Baker

46. “Long words, fat talk they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?”

— Russell Baker

47. “Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.”

— Russell Baker

48. “Industrial-strength foolishness sets in-in males, at least-at about the age of 18. This is why the military prefers males in the 18-to-25-year-old range when there’s combat to be done.”

— Russell Baker

49. “Sending grown-ups up the wall is one of the things adolescence is all about. A few years ago it was done with rock ‘n’ roll music. Now at least they can do it quietly with a home computer.”

— Russell Baker

50. “After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.”

— Russell Baker