196 Quotes by Russell Baker

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.

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.

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

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.

There’s so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.

Perhaps humans have always had this ridiculous belief in the absolute excellence of the present, this conviction that the world into which they have had the marvelous good luck to be born is the best world that ever was, the best that ever will be.

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.

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on ‘canned’ laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.

Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they’ll be playing on oriental rugs.