"Russell Wayne Baker" is an American writer known for his satirical commentary and self-critical prose, as well as for his autobiography, Growing Up (memoir)/Growing Up.

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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.

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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.

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People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.

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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.

238

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.

198

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.

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

186

People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.

182

Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.

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I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

146

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on "canned" laughter grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.

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

141

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

135

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

118

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

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The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

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