P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

In your late teens and early twenties, everything is idealism. Everything should just work in black and white. That's good. You need that. I think most revolutions are started by people in their teens and twenties.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

The most irresistible charm of youth is its bubbling enthusiasm. Youth sees no darkness ahead - no defile that has no outlet - it forgets that there is such a thing as failure in the world and believes that mankind has been waiting all these centuries for him to come and be the liberator of truth and energy and beauty.

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.

Cynicism stems from disappointment. Cynical and faithless people were not always like that. They were filled with possibilities and hope as kids. But they tried and perhaps failed.

I got by on talent. That was my fatal mistake.

I was naive enough to think that I could make the difference.

You're an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.

To be candid, some people have given positive thinking a bad name. I can't stand to hear some gung-ho individual say that with positive thinking you can just do 'anything.' If you think about that one for a moment, you recognize the absurdity of it.

Too often people view idealists as naive.

They [philosophers] conceive of men, not as they are, but as they themselves would like them to be

I guess there's something that's appealing to me about people that are aspirational-slash-deluded.

I've got to be honest, with every job I do there's a part of me, that child in me, that goes, 'This is the one.' And it rarely actually is.

I don't have a good thing to say about Eric Bischoff or anything he ever did. Talk about the Midas touch, he was the opposite.

When you're young, you're cocky.

. . . idealism is one of the greatest forces in the world. It makes seeming impossibilities possible and succeeds where prudence fails. But unless the idealist is brave and has the courage to face the truth, his idealism creates nothing.

There was this kind of wackiness that was really embraced and put on a pedestal. It was before the millennium. We were envisioning a future that was mostly idealistic. I think that came crashing down a little bit in 9/11, or a lot. There is something about Portland that does seem to still exist in this total idealistic world and total idealistic mind frame, and I think that's what Dream of the '90s is talking about.

I think that you're smarter than we were, but we had two things: one is, in our naïveté we believed we could change the world. And number two, we believed that another world was possible. And once that belief took hold of some critical mass, a tiny minority nonetheless, but a critical mass of people, then the world did change.

It's not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ones.

No one more cynical than an idealist.

Optimist: day-dreamer in his small clothes.

When I first went to Africa, I thought that I was personally going to save the continent, if not the world.

Too much success can ruin you as surely as too much failure.

I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

You will never win fame and fortune unless you invent big ideas.