Russell Baker

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

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

People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.

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

Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.

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.

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.

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.

Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.

Anything that isn't opposed by about 40 percent of humanity is either an evil business or so unimportant that it simply doesn't matter.

Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.

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.

Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.

Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.

My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.

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

Americans like fat books and thin women.

It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.