After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without f… - Russell Baker

At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

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.

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

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.