Russell Baker Quotes on Culture

5 quotes

  1. In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

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

  3. In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

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

  5. Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.

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