P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
You start out with Mad magazine, and you go right through the sort of black humor of Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Paul Krassner... If you put Lenny together with Mad magazine and run it through the brain of a college student, you get National Lampoon.
Quotes to Explore
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Relinquishing apparent national sovereignty does not have to entail a loss of national sovereignty, but can actually be a benefit.
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I know you think that when you're 35, 45, 55, you'll be different. But I'm going to let you in on a bit of a secret. You're going to look different, and your life is going to be different, but in your head you'll always be that 16-year-old girl.
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Wong Kar-wai and Ang Lee are two Asian directors I'm really fond of.
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Now, everybody knows my music. So that's really cool. A lot of kids know it. Now, when I go to a sports game, everybody knows my name.
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My voice is not good enough for me to sing a song.
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The stage of the development of the productive forces determines the political and ideological superstructure of society which are crystallized into a system of social organization.
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The one thing that you simply have to remember all the time that you are there, is that Hollywood is an oriental city. As long as you do that you might survive. If you try to equate it with anything else you'll perish.
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Urban America is like a foreign country in a sense.
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If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
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The surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than I would have imagined and far greater than the American public has been able to debate.
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Today, only 2 percent of the people know the name of someone serving in uniform. That means 2 percent of your listeners can actually conjure up the image of someone wearing the uniform of the military of the United States.
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I think when I first straightened my hair, I was a teenager. I don't believe that I was consciously doing it to look white or to be on television. It never crossed my mind. All of the girls in my neighborhood got perms and their hair straightened. But I know that historically it was to assimilate and there are some people who do it for that reason.
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We're in danger of breaking our army and preventing our national leaders from having the flexibility to confront not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but crises around the globe.
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I don't think I'm a workaholic. Every weekend, I invite my colleagues and friends to my home to play cards. And people, my neighbors, are always surprised because I live on the second floor apartment, and there are usually 40 pairs of shoes in front of my gate, and people play cards inside and play chess. We have a lot of fun.
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Exploiters and manipulators have always used religion self-righteously to further their own selfish ends.
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Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It's the other way around. They never vote for us.
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It's tricky, performing the show live. Because when you're in a big auditorium, in front of 700 people, the natural tendency is to want to talk louder. You want to project.
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I love being in a courtroom.
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Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.
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One of my assistants, a British man, says I should find a platform for [cosmetic industry]. Meanwhile I wear make-up.
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When I look in the mirror, I see a work in progress.
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Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.
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Never having played Chess before, it was most interesting to be playing the game with no pieces in front of me. But I still knew how to stroke my hair when I won.
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You start out with Mad magazine, and you go right through the sort of black humor of Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Paul Krassner... If you put Lenny together with Mad magazine and run it through the brain of a college student, you get National Lampoon.
