P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
In the American political system, you're only allowed to have real ideas if it's absolutely guaranteed that you can't win an election
Quotes to Explore
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A British porch is a musty, forbidding non-room in which to fling a sodden umbrella or a muddy pair of boots; a guard against the elements and strangers. By contrast the good ol' American front porch seems to stand for positivity and openness; a platform from which to welcome or wave farewell; a place where things of significance could happen.
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In American films, Russians are often portrayed like cartoon villains without clear motivations.
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President Obama has contempt for real money.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.
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I have new ideas every day, and I always want to take on new challenges.
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Islam is a violent, I was going to say religion, but it's not a religion. It's a political system. It's a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination. That is the ultimate aim.
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There is resistance to change. There's a resistance to ideas.
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I just don't consider myself to be, you know, an American actor. I don't want that life.
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The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.
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Over my career, I've reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of Communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.
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My skin may have wrinkles but it's because I'm smiling so much. That might sound like some terrible American greetings card, but I feel it's immoral for me to castigate my body for getting older, when it does everything I ask of it.
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There's some real dark days where you just feel like the story is falling apart in every one. Just keep moving forward, even when you are bluffing, even when you don't quite know what is going to happen next.
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The political environment we create matters because a disturbed person cannot always tell the difference between explosive rhetoric and explosive actions.
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Once you are satisfied with your goal, it is the real happiness.
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It's so inspiring to be around other people who have ideas you haven't thought of, and all of a sudden you're like, 'Wow! That's so amazing!' I definitely want everything I do to just get better and better.
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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.
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I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
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Romney has to convince the American public that they need to do something they're not usually inclined to do - replace a sitting president with a challenger. And unlike in 1980 and 1992, when the public was persuaded to do just that, the incumbent president has not been weakened by a primary opponent.
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Knowledge is now accepted as the best we humans can do at the moment, but with the hope that we will turn out to be wrong - and thus to advance our knowledge. What's happening to networked knowledge seems to make it much closer to the scientific idea of what knowledge is.
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It's spooky to look at yourself, because you are never quite what you think you are. And you are never as good looking as the person you are acting with, or something like that. So I learned to stay away from it because it was giving me more negative feelings than positive ones.
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In all of my books, I've emphasized that the fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that, for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor.
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In the American political system, you're only allowed to have real ideas if it's absolutely guaranteed that you can't win an election
