I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world. – Russell Baker
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings. – Russell Baker
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. – Russell Baker
Do not waste a minute, not a second, in trying to demonstrate to others the merit of your own performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it, but you can labor steadily on to something which needs no advocate but itself. – Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” The Atlantic Monthl