The collection / 30 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

30 results · Page 1 of 2Play this collection ▷

01c. 1972 AD

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.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

02c. 1972 AD

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

Russell Baker / quote

↗

03c. 1972 AD

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.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

04c. 1972 AD

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.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

05c. 1972 AD

We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a refrigerator into a fifth floor walk-up.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

06c. 1972 AD

One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning and hanging were Christian things to do…

Russell Baker / quote

↗

07c. 1972 AD

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.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

08c. 1972 AD

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 fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. 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.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

09c. 1972 AD

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.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

10c. 1972 AD

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

Russell Baker / quote

↗

11c. 1972 AD

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned but give him a little metal a few chemicals some wire and 20 or 30 billion dollars and vroom! There he is up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

12c. 1972 AD

I've had an unhappy life thank God.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

13c. 1972 AD

When you're the only pea in the pod your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

14c. 1972 AD

Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime and should be taken in small doses.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

15c. 1972 AD

When compelled to cook I produce a meal that would make a sword swallower gag.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

16c. 1972 AD

Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

17c. 1972 AD

Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

18c. 1972 AD

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.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

19c. 1972 AD

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

Russell Baker / quote

↗

20c. 1972 AD

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

21c. 1972 AD

Americans like fat books and thin women.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

22c. 1972 AD

Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

23c. 1972 AD

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

Russell Baker / quote

↗

24c. 1972 AD

Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

Russell Baker / quote

↗