Zitat des Tages von Russell Baker:
Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.
People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.
A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.
What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.
Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.
You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
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.
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Americans like fat books and thin women.
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.
It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
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.
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.
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.
My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.
Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.
Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.
Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.
A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.