A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.
Russell Baker

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
Russell Baker

Americans like fat books and thin women.
Russell Baker

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.
Russell Baker

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.
Russell Baker

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
Russell Baker

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.
Russell Baker

Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
Russell Baker

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.
Russell Baker

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
Russell Baker


In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
Russell Baker

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.
Russell Baker

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Russell Baker

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.
Russell Baker

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

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

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

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Russell Baker

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

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