Life & Mortality Quote by Russell Baker

A warning disguised as a shrug: Baker’s line skewers the modern temptation to treat attention as oxygen. The phrasing borrows the moral cadence of “live by the sword, die by the sword,” but swaps in something more slippery and more American. Publicity isn’t just a tool here; it’s a lifestyle, a metabolism. If you “live by” it, you’ve accepted that your worth is measured in mentions, profiles, and the endless churn of being noticed.

Baker’s specific intent is less to scold celebrities than to puncture the fantasy that publicity is neutral or controllable. The subtext is brutal: attention is a predator that eventually turns on its handlers. The same spotlight that elevates can also interrogate, distort, and exhaust. “Probably” is the dagger twist - not every attention-seeker gets publicly ruined, but the odds tilt that way because publicity runs on volatility. It rewards the most compressible version of a person, then punishes them for being more complicated than their headline.

As a journalist, Baker understood the machinery from the inside. Publicity is not the same as public life; it’s the mediated, marketable simulation of it. In the late 20th century - his era of mass broadcast and tabloid escalation - reputations could be built fast and liquidated faster. The line anticipates today’s attention economy with eerie accuracy: if your identity is outsourced to the audience, the audience will eventually repossess it.