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
-
Relinquishing apparent national sovereignty does not have to entail a loss of national sovereignty, but can actually be a benefit.
-
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.
-
Wong Kar-wai and Ang Lee are two Asian directors I'm really fond of.
-
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.
-
My voice is not good enough for me to sing a song.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Urban America is like a foreign country in a sense.
-
If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Exploiters and manipulators have always used religion self-righteously to further their own selfish ends.
-
Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It's the other way around. They never vote for us.
-
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.
-
I love being in a courtroom.
-
Eating-wise, I'm fairly disciplined. I have to be, because if you're not eating correctly, you're not giving your body the fuel it needs. So, I stay away from carbs after the morning, and I eat a lot of protein - fish, chicken, and no red meat.
-
What happens to one man may happen to all.
-
A friend of mine introduced me to Thurston Moore because she thought I would like him. He was playing with the tallest band in the world, the Coachmen. They were sort of like Talking Heads, jangly guitar, Feelies guitar. Anyway, it was love at first sight. His band broke up that night. And we started playing.
-
It's actually not unlike Google at that stage of development. They had an up-and-running site. It wasn't losing very much money, it wasn't making very much money, but it was growing.
-
I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.
-
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.
