P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
Quotes to Explore
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In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world.
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The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
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In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.
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Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.
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I grew and learned, journeyed and understood, that someone who is afraid of failing won't get anywhere, and someone who dares to do it runs the risk of failure if they don't learn, correct their mistakes, and get back up.
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Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.
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I had a one-year-old son. How will my failure or success limit what he becomes? I was trying to write screenplays. It doesn't pay very well until you sell one. I was poor.
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The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
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I do know that you have to choose between the logic of reconciliation and the logic of justice. Pure justice leads to new civil war. I prefer the negotiable revolution.
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The competitive nature of most mums and dads is astounding. The fear they instil in our promising but sensitive Johnny is utterly depressing. We need a parental cultural revolution.
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Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
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My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.
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People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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I don't take it very seriously. You shouldn't let your success get to your head or failure get to your heart. This is most commonly said. But people don't really practise it. I don't see myself as a celebrity; it has not sunk in. I just see myself as someone doing a nine-to-six job like a techie.
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If you're the type of person who has to fulfill your dreams, you've gotta be resourceful to make sure you can do it. I came out to California when I was 21, thinking my New York credentials would take me all the way. I came back home a year later all dejected and a failure.
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The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.
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America traditionally represents the greatest possibility of someone's going from nothing to something. Why? In theory, if not practice, the government stays out of the way and lets individuals take risks and reap rewards or accept the consequences of failure. We call this capitalism - or, at least, we used to.
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I've always felt that failure was a completely underrated experience.
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Lincoln was a modernizer, so to speak. He believed in economic development. As a Whig before the war he favored what we would call infrastructure spending, government appropriation for canals, railroads, river and harbor improvements, and a tariff to protect industry. He believed in this market revolution that was sweeping across Northern society. He himself benefited from it in his own life.
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A prophet such as we could use again today,strong,zealous,angry and gloomy in opposition to the leaders,the masses indeed the whole world.(Letter to his pastor Julius Schubring ,1846 regarding Medelssohn's choral work 'Elijah' published that year)
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Even before my audition, there were several pages missing from my script because those bits were so unbelievably secret not even I was allowed to see them.
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By nature, I was a little guy with big legs - a stocky lad.
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Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
