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Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history."

— Russell Baker So This Is Depravity (1980)

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More quotes by Russell Baker

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

So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn't even be classified as work.

Growing Up (1982)

The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.

There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

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

Unaware of history's higher significance, I slumbered through the bliss of infancy, feeling no impulse whatever to make something of myself.

Growing Up (1982)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Russell Baker (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.