Russell Baker citations (40 citations)

“The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.”

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Russell Baker

"Getting on with It" (p.103)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

“In America nothing dies easier than tradition.”

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Russell Baker

"A Little Bones Trouble," The New York Times (1991-05-14)

“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.”

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Russell Baker

"Inside the Suit, a Man!," The New York Times (1986-11-05)

“Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.”

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Russell Baker

"Introduction to 'We're Losing Contact, Captain'" (p.353)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

“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.”

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Russell Baker

"Talking Clothes" (p.109)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“This may be why New Yorkers instinctively avoid making eye contact with each other in crowded places, why they "look right through you," as dismayed visitors often complain. They are not looking right through you at all; they are discreetly avoiding an intrusion into your space. They sense the danger in a place where a one-degree temperature rise can mean an explosion.”

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Russell Baker

"Spaced In" (p.120)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history."”

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Russell Baker

"All Right, Jerry, Drop the Cookbook" (p.47)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“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.”

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Russell Baker

"Come Back, Dizzy" (p.187)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“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.”

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Russell Baker

"So This Is Depravity" (p.25)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“Early in life, most of us probably observe an unhappy relationship between labor and wealth — to wit, the heavier the labor, the less the wealth.
The man doing heavy manual work makes less than the man who makes a machine work for him, and this man makes less than the man sitting at a desk. The really rich people, the kind who go around on yachts and collect old books and new wives, do no labor at all.
The economic reasons for dividing the money this way are clear enough. One, it has always been done that way; and two, it's too hard to change at this late date. But the puzzling question is why, since the money is parceled out on this principle, young people are constantly being pummeled to take up a life of labor.
In any sensible world, the young would be told they could labor if they wanted to, but warned that if they did so it would cost them.”

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Russell Baker

"Lost Labor Love" (p.170)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way.”

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Russell Baker

"Small Kicks in Superland" (p.56)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“There is no business like show business, Irving Berlin once proclaimed, and thirty years ago he may have been right, but not anymore. Nowadays almost every business is like show business, including politics, which has become more like show business than show business is.”

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Russell Baker

"The Face Game" (p.215)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“Of all the people insistently expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing headlines to trample him flat.”

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Russell Baker

"Introduction" (p.14)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

“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.”

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Russell Baker

"Lost Labor Love" (p.172)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

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

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Russell Baker

"The Fact About Progress," The New York Times (1970-02-24)

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

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Russell Baker

"The Muscular Opiate," The New York Times (1967-10-03)

“I am unclear what a "role model" is, but those who used the term seemed to be saying that teachers are people children tend to emulate. In any event, many Miamians must have thought their children would become homosexual if subjected to homosexual teachers.
That prompted me to ponder teachers I haven't seen, and scarcely thought about, for decades, and for the first time I reflected on how their sex lives had affected my own. My first thought was that it was curious, perhaps perverse, that I have not turned out to be a spinster.”

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Russell Baker

"Role Models" (p.202)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“Can't-do guys do all right in Washington, perhaps because lobbying is the one thing that can't-do guys almost always can do, and magnificently. Detroit may not be able to dispose of exhaust very neatly, but it can build a beautiful lobbying machine for selling Government the story of its own inadequacy.
What is it in the Washington air that restores the energies of these once dynamic American manufacturers? Something there is that brings out all the latent half-forgotten ingenuity that seems to have abandoned them back in the home plant.”

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Russell Baker

"The Can't-Do Guys" (p.47)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

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

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Russell Baker

"The Sport of Counting Each Other Out" The New York Times (1967-11-02)

“No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat.
The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.”

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Russell Baker

"Moods of Washington" (p.38)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him.”

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Russell Baker

"The President's Plumbing" (p.19)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“You talk a great deal about building a better world for your children, but when you are young you can no more envision a world inherited by your children than you can conceive of dying. The society you mold, you mold for yourself.
It was this way with my generation. We were unhappy with what we inherited and we tried to reshape it in ways that would make it more tolerable to us. You were not uppermost in our thoughts.
Now, in middle age, some of us are trying to rewrite history. Some of us tell you, "We labored and dared and sacrificed — all for you — yet we hear no thanks."
You will not be unduly moved, I hope, by these laments. They are sentimental cries from persons so attached to the society they have rebuilt that they cannot bear the thought of seeing it overhauled by new proprietors.”

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Russell Baker

"The Becoming Looseness of Doom" (p.79)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

“One may speculate whether the contemporary idea of American society in decay is not a false notion which has been created, at least partially, by this old movie portrait of a society that was once stable, orderly and governed by the immutable justice of the Hollywood censorship code.
This is the ever-popular myth of a golden age which persuades so many generations that there was once a wonderful moment in the past when the world was sound and good people ruled and evil was justly punished. After Camelot came chaos and despair, except, of course, that Camelot never existed, any more than the world portrayed by those old Hollywood films existed.”

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Russell Baker

"Golden Oldies" (p.293)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“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?”

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Russell Baker

"American Fat" (p.46)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“President Reagan brought us to the ultimate: America As Total Television. During his governance the printed word simply ceased to matter. White House dynamos had once telephoned newspapers to complain about unfair reporting. Not anymore. Now they telephoned network bosses. Even then it wasn't poor reporting they complained about, but poor pictures.
A network reporter who thought her report on shortcomings in Reaganland would anger the President's cadres was amazed when the man in charge of propaganda thanked her for doing them a good turn. But, she said, that was a tough piece of reporting.
Oh, the words may have been, said the gentleman, but on television words didn't matter. What mattered were pictures. And the pictures had been wonderful.”

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Russell Baker

"'Star Wars' Mania" (p.346)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

“Old people at the supermarket make you wonder about all those middle-aged people you see jogging the streets to preserve their vascular systems for another fifty years.
And about all the people of all ages all over the country who are eating less, drinking less, smoking less, driving safer and in general looking for a death-proof safety suit to get them over the peak years and down into the valley of old age fit to enjoy the fruits of their abstention and labor.
Will anybody care when they get there?
Will they be able to afford an orange?”

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Russell Baker

"The Aged, Shopping" (p.96)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“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.”

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Russell Baker

"Back to the Dump" (p.414)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

“Some years back, all the best people came to bipartisan agreement that the most shameful thing a person could do with power was not to use it.
Since then everybody who wants to get ahead in Washington has made a great show of being a fierce fellow when left alone in the room with a little power. There seems to be a fear that if there is somebody around so low that it is all right to dump the garbage on him, and you hesitate, everybody will call you a sissy, and you will never be invited to lunch with Professor Kissinger.
Strange values result. Great killers are esteemed for good citizenship. "Not afraid to use power," people say of them.”

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Russell Baker

"Cultivated Killing" (p.33)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“By any precise definition, Washington is a city of advanced depravity. There one meets and dines with the truly great killers of the age, but only the quirkily fastidious are offended, for the killers are urbane and learned gentlemen who discuss their work with wit and charm and know which tool to use on the escargots.
On New York's East Side one occasionally meets a person so palpably evil as to be fascinatingly irresistible. There is a smell of power and danger on these people, and one may be horrified, exhilarated, disgusted or mesmerized by the awful possibilities they suggest, but never simply depressed.
Depression comes in the presence of depravity that makes no pretense about itself, a kind of depravity that says, "You and I, we are base, ugly, tasteless, cruel and beastly; let's admit it and have a good wallow."
That is how Times Square speaks. And not only Times Square. Few cities in the country lack the same amenities. Pornography, prostitution, massage parlors, hard-core movies, narcotics dealers — all seem to be inescapable and permanent results of an enlightened view of liberty which has expanded the American's right to choose his own method of shaping a life.
Granted such freedom, it was probably inevitable that many of us would yield to the worst instincts, and many do, and not only in New York. Most cities, however, are able to keep the evidence out of the center of town. Under a rock, as it were. In New York, a concatenation of economics, shifting real estate values and subway lines has worked to turn the rock over and put the show on display in the middle of town.
What used to be called "The Crossroads of the World" is now a sprawling testament to the dreariness which liberty can produce when it permits people with no taste whatever to enjoy the same right to depravity as the elegant classes.”

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Russell Baker

"Cheesy" (p.231)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

“The cruel law of life is that a solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems than you have to.”

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Russell Baker

"The Big Problem Binge," The New York Times (1965-03-18)

Russell Baker citations

Russell Baker: Citations en anglais