Russell Baker

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

"This may be why New Yorkers instinctively avoid making eye contact with each other in crowded places, why they "look right through you," as dismayed visitors often complain. They are not looking right…"

"Long words, fat talk — they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?"

"The cruel law of life is that a solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems than you have to."

"Of all the people insistently expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing headlines to tr…"

"In America nothing dies easier than tradition."

"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."

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