Russell Baker
On August 14, 1925, US journalist, humorist and biographer Russell Baker was born in Loudoun County, Virginia. His father died early on and his hard-working mother reared him and his sisters during the Great Depression. Baker managed to get himself into Johns Hopkins University, where he studied journalism.
Baker’s wit as a humorist has been compared with that of Mark Twain. “The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer,” wrote Baker, “and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.” In 1979, Baker received his first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in his “Observer” column for the New York Times (1962 to 1998). His 1983 autobiography, Growing Up earned him a second Pulitzer. In 1993, Baker began hosting the PBS television series Masterpiece Theatre.
Neil Postman, in the preface to Conscientious Objections, describes Baker as "like some fourth century citizen of Rome who is amused and intrigued by the Empire's collapse but who still cares enough to mock the stupidities that are hastening its end. He is, in my opinion, a precious national resource, and as long as he does not get his own television show, America will remain stronger than Russia." (1991, xii)
“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.”
“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”
“New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.”
“Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.”
“Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories -- those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”