A Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

Politics is the art of achieving prestige and power without merit.

P. J. O'Rourke

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Achieving Art Merit Politics Power Prestige Without

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P. J. O'Rourke
American - Comedian
Born: November 14, 1947

Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.

P. J. O'Rourke

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit

P. J. O'Rourke

Politics is the art of achieving political goals - of achieving what is possible in a given situation - that is, in a situation that has its conditions and its limits.

Adam Michnik

Mere bashfulness without merit is awkward; and merit without modesty, insolent. But modest merit has a double claim to acceptance, and generally meets with as many patrons as beholders.

Joseph Addison

As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself.

John Luther Adams

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.

Gustave Courbet

The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.

Simone Weil

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty - their power and privilege - to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians.

P. J. O'Rourke

Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.

C. Wright Mills

Authority doesn't work without prestige, or prestige without distance.

Charles de Gaulle

He that has once concluded it lawful to resist power, when it wants merit, will soon find a want of merit, to justify his resistance to power.

Samuel Johnson

Politics [is] the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.

Barry Goldwater

Politics has always been the art of the possible. Today it's too often the art of the probable - tinkering around the edges without any greater vision, without a sense of optimism and imagination.

John F. Kerry

Those who think religion has nothing to do with politics understand neither religion or politics... The things that will destroy us are: politics without principles, pleasures without conscience, knowledge without character, business without morality.

Mahatma Gandhi

To be honest, I think, for me, the power is always with art. The art world clearly couldn't happen without art.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist

The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics--or more precisely, Revolution--co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church.

Octavio Paz

A Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

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