Russell Baker - Notable Quotations

Notable Quotations

• "The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him." A contribution to the philosophy of Resistentialism.

• "Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it."

• "The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist."

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

• "Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity."

• "I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world."

• "One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning, and hanging were Christian things to do..."

• "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."

• "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."