P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Life is about movement, expansion, growth, and actualizing potential. If you stay in a home, relationship, or job beyond the time it is healthy for you, the universe will prod you with thorns as if to say, “It’s time to move to a broader domain.” If you do not heed the message, the thorns will get sharper and at some point you will have no choice but to fly. When you do, you will understand why a once comfortable situation became uncomfortable.

The bottom line is, the more we have a cadre of women moving up the scale, and it doesn't seem threatening, and people realize that women actually work much harder than men, and realize that they need more women in these jobs, I think that goes away.

People forget that it's an acting assignment. You can work with someone for three months, three years or 30 years, and then you move on. I've done I don't know how many films, and I can look at the film and know that I worked with Clint Eastwood, but I'm not still trying to hang out with Clint Eastwood. We did our jobs.

The law, right now, permits companies that close down American factories and offices and move those jobs overseas to take a tax deduction for the costs associated with moving the jobs to China or India or wherever.

If a hungry lion suddenly appeared, you'd be terrified. So terrified you'd probably run away. Great, fear's doing its job. But you might get so afraid that you lock up and can't move. This would be very bad. Guilt's the same. It can prevent you from fixing the situation, make you feel so bad you can't function at 100% and even lead to more guilt-provoking bad behavior.

Doing all the rig work and the stunt work has actually been wonderful. It's a whole new skill set that I've learned that I'll get to take onto my next jobs. We get to do that all the time, the fighting and the learning new moves. It's quite exciting.

Also to get to see over the course of time how they change, and how Andy [Hertzfeld], regardless of how he's treated, still maintains a friendship with Steve [Jobs] over the course of time. Enough to want to show up and cheer him on. It says a lot about his character, and also that he cares about Steve. Yeah, I find it moving, and I find it a lovely thing on Andy's part.

That's what I think my job in the world has been, is to sort of try to sit silently a bit and watch it all sort of move and see those small, quiet details, whether it be a small village outside of Colombo [country?] or the favelas of Brazil, where, again, resistance culture is something that you hear resonating in the streets of South Central Los Angeles as well.

You could be jealous of a girl who's not as pretty as you, but you just have that feeling that she's going to take your dude, and you might be right. Or you might be jealous of somebody who's not as good at their job as you, but you have this feeling that she's got that something extra that's going to help her move ahead. Whatever it is, you might have that weird feeling, and you might be right.

America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

I'm a big history buff so to walk the streets...the ancient world like that was pretty astounding.

I feel very, very fortunate to have the success that I've had. I want to keep working and keep moving forward. Acting is my dream job. I love it so much.

With our abundance of wind, solar, and geothermal energy, Nevada has been a leader in moving away from carbon emissions and embracing a clean energy economy that has created good-paying jobs in our state that can't be shipped overseas.

We have to look at for example the increasing globalization of capital, the whole system of transitional capitalism now which has had an impact on black populations - that has for example eradicated large numbers of jobs that black people traditionally have been able to count upon and created communities where the tax base is lost now as a result of corporations moving to the third world in order to discover cheap labor.

If our prayer is “Dear God, please use me to be of service,” then that is what we will be. And it is not for us to judge either the size or value of our gifts. Our job is to try to get out of the way, to defer to the spirit moving within us and become open channels for the flow of God’s love.

Anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around - you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life.

Let's say you want to do a job, and you want to be really successful. You want to rise really high in that career. But where you live, that job doesn't exist. Your town's too small. Or maybe the business is your town, but even if you reach the pinnacle there, because it's a small town, it's not nearly as high as you could go. If you're unwilling to move, well, that's all on you. That's a limitation you're placing on yourself. Now, that's fine if that's what makes you happy.

So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things.

And yet, over the years I've met so many people like Jared who seem to be more at home, happier, living in a country on of their birth. ... Not political refugees, escaping a repressing regime, nor economic refugees, crossing a border in search of a better-paying job. The are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually hedonic refugees have an ephiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, that they were born in the wrong country.

In actual fact, I wanted to be an actor, but I was a lawyer, and I was a week away from qualifying and was fired. And that's the day I made an announcement: "Hey, for seven years, you thought I was going to be a lawyer. Well, I'm not. I've just lost my job, and I'm packing my bags and moving to London tomorrow to be an actor."

I feel like that [the role in Star Trek] is a prime example of, yeah, I got that role and it was awesome, because it changed a lot for me professionally, but then creatively, it became a whole other thing, with J.J. [Abrams] and Chris [Pine] and the people I got to know. Now I just feel like it's our jobs to be open and to keep moving stuff forward. I don't know what that means. This is the first time in a long time that I have no idea what's happening next. As scary as that is, and as anxiety-provoking as that can still be, it's also really exciting.

If [hand-drawn animation] is a dying craft, we can't do anything about it. Civilization moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era.

It looks like [Donald] Trump's plan has the potential to actually move the needle on economic growth because he wants to lower taxes and lower regulations. That would be very powerful in terms of creating jobs.

Intel announced it will move ahead with a new plant in Arizona that probably was never going to move ahead with, and that will result in at least so - in at least 10,000 American jobs.

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.