Top 15 Russell Baker Quotes

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

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.

New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.

When speaking aloud, you punctuate constantly — with body language.

Your listener hears commas, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks as you shout, whisper, pause, wave your arms, roll your eyes, wrinkle your brow.

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear the way you want to be heard.

Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.

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.

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

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.

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

We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.

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

A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, ‘Come on in, the living’s fine,’ and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories — those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost

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.