P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.
Quotes to Explore
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Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
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Inside every adult male is a denied little boy.
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At times, it seems as if the only women effortlessly balancing their jobs, kids, husbands and homes are the ones on TV.
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I'm for absolute autonomy of the individual, and an adult, competent woman has absolute autonomy. It's her choice.
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In writing a little tragedy, 'The Gaol Gate,' I made the scenario in three lines, 'He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.' I wrote that play very quickly.
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Winning a gold medal is not easy but I believed in myself, especially over the last four years.
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I'm kind of a sucker for the retro-diagnoses.
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In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.
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I was very rebellious.
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I have a terrible fear of travel. Just before we go, I start to panic and tell my wife I don't want to go. It's ridiculous. But actually it's only when it's somewhere I've not been to before.
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I think everybody can identify, you know, with this sort of struggle to decide for yourself who you are, you know, and what your place in life is.
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War triggers unforeseeable military dynamics and sets off massive political shocks, creating new problems as well as new opportunities.
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If the people don't want to come out to the ballpark, nobody's going to stop them.
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Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with.
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Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
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Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections.
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Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.
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Whence it is somewhat strange that any men from so mean and silly a practice should expect commendation, or that any should afford regard thereto; the which it is so far from meriting, that indeed contempt and abhorrence are due to it.
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The assumption of perfectly rational, maximizing behavior won out until recently in the art of modeling, not because it often reflects reality, but because it was useful.
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There's no question that the best way to get people to care about an issue is to humanize it.
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We need a free media, not just freedom of speech.
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Most people spend less than 20 hrs a year learning about freedom, yet many wonder why it's in decline. Don't fight upstream. Instead, turn it around.
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I never felt popular as a child and never had best friends.
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Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.
