Quotes by Russell Baker

"Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear."

"There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance."

"Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder."

"Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong."

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

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

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

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

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

"When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed."