P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

Those of our people who do not study history can be duped into believing anything.

To remain ignorant of history is to remain forever a child

In the words of a very famous dead person, 'A nation that does not know its history is doomed to do poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Education was the most important value in our home when I was growing up. People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history.

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

A man without education is an incomplete being.

The study of history is in the truest sense an education, and a training for political life.

Certainly, the illiterates of past centuries, then an enormous majority of mankind, knew little of the history of their respective countries and of their civilization. In the minds of modern illiterates, however, who know how to read and write and even teach in schools and at universities, history is present but blurred, in a state of strange confusion; Molière becomes a contemporary of Napoleon, Voltaire, a contemporary of Lenin.

Histories are to educate so that we understand better for ourselves and for motivation.

Not to know what happened before means to remain forever a child.

To be ignorant of the past is to be forever a child.

I'm not an educated man. I only know what I'm told, and I'm not told that much; I have no frame of reference for how to place things in history be a responsible leader. All I can do is be an artist.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

I love researching. That's one of my favorite parts about school.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

Few things are as essential as education.

The more I read, the more I realise what I don't know.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.