When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
Interpretation
This quote humorously suggests that those who are overly cautious or completely reckless in their views on cars represent the extremes of human behavior.
Russell Baker's quote implies that people tend to react to cars in one of two contradictory ways: either they are afraid of them, embodying caution and timidity, or they are foolishly reckless, choosing to disregard safety and responsibility. This dichotomy serves as a commentary on human nature and our relationship with risk, particularly in the context of automobiles, which can evoke both fear and excitement.
In practice
During a speech about risk-taking, one might reference this quote to illustrate extremes of caution and recklessness.
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.
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
RIBALDRY, n. Censorious language by another concerning oneself.
So that's why one of my rules of parody writing is that it's gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.
The doctor seemed especially troubled by the fact of the robbery having been unexpected, and attempted in the night-time; as if it were the established custom of gentlemen in the housebreaking way to transact business at noon, and to make an appointment, by the twopenny post, a day or two previous.
It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driverβs head. βHey, bus driver,β I said. βCan I smoke?β βMay I,β said the bus driver. βI love you,β I said.
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