196 Quotes by Russell Baker

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.

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

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.

A man doesn’t amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that’s all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.

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

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.

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.

Notice, for example, that people who talk about “the joys of childhood” are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.

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.