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Russell Wayne Baker
(14 Aug 1925 - )
American journalist.
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Science Quotes by Russell Wayne Baker (7 quotes)
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.
— Russell Wayne Baker
'Sunday Observer: Terminal Education', New York Times Magazine (9 Nov 1980), 8.
Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three categories—those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose
— Russell Wayne Baker
'Observer: The Plot Against People', New York Times (18 Jun 1968), 46.
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.
— Russell Wayne Baker
In There's a Country in my Cellar (1990), 161.
Modern times breed modern phobias. Until the present age, for example, it has been impossible for any woman to suffer crippling fear of artificial insemination.
— Russell Wayne Baker
(1986).
Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.
— Russell Wayne Baker
'Why on Earth Are We There? Because It's Impossible', New York Times (21 Jul 1969), 46.
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
[Written when the first manned mission to the Moon, Apollo 11, landed (20 Jul 1969).]
[Written when the first manned mission to the Moon, Apollo 11, landed (20 Jul 1969).]
— Russell Wayne Baker
'Why on Earth Are We There? Because It's Impossible', New York Times (21 Jul 1969), 17.
What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.
— Russell Wayne Baker
'Why on Earth Are We There? Because It's Impossible', New York Times (21 Jul 1969), 17.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
