Skip to content

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

— Russell Baker Growing Up (1982)

Another quote →

Topics

History

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.

Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.

So This Is Depravity (1980)

All Russell Baker quotes →

You may also like

A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

Attribution

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.