Russell Baker Quotes

He's earned a lifetime of peace and happiness, but some people never get what they deserve. That's why there are saints in gutters and sadists in palaces.

I have come to believe that one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger are more bearable than injustice.

Privilege is the greatest enemy of right.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

There has been enough suffering in our country, there has been enough of children whose dreams die before they have a chance to grow and there has been enough of our elders who, having served their nation, are forced into indignity in their old age.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

I had a very comfortable life, but there were people who spent their life in prison, whose families were destroyed.

The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.

The glaring injustice is there for all who are not blinded by prejudice to see.

God has always been hard on the poor.

This is a hard job to do …. We represent the underdog, and that makes the top dogs angry.

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

Justice is not available to all equally; it is something that many of us must struggle to achieve.

It is definitely true that adversity and hardship are not evenly distributed.

People who are underprivileged have more to grieve and have more to overcome.

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own time.

My life has been varied, involving many jobs, but I have always been impatient with injustice.

Injustice drives me crazy!

Awkwardness comes from the realization that, when you look around the world, it's difficult to identify anyone who isn't either the victim or the beneficiary of injustice.

We shall not always plant while others reap

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

O neglectful Nature, wherefore art thou thus partial, becoming to some of thy children a tender and benignant mother, to others a most cruel and ruthless stepmother? I see thy children given into slavery to others without ever receiving any benefit, and in lieu of any reward for the services they have done for them they are repaid by the severest punishments.

Why is life so difficult for some people and not for others? Why do some people have to struggle so much?

People look back on those days through a thick veil of nostalgia, but life was hard if you were anything other than a rich, powerful white male