A Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

Then there's politics. Just imagine politics with its dumbbell element subtracted. There would be no Republican candidates. There would be no Democratic voters. The whole system would collapse.
This is the beauty of Donald Trump, that he goes against the Republican orthodoxy, much of which has been rejected a lot of Republican voters, who, well, would be Republican voters, at least in my state, who I think would otherwise like to vote Republican.
If there were two candidates, a Democrat and a Republican, who each committed to the same kind of fundamental reform, then the election would be an election between the vice presidential candidates. It'd be just like the regular election, except it would be one step down.
The politics of personal destruction, the politics of division, the politics of fear, it's all there. It helps you to define the politics of moderation - the politics of democratic respect, the politics of hope - more clearly.
Frankly speaking, I could never even imagine that such information would be of interest to the American public or that the campaign headquarters of one of the candidates - in this case, Mrs. [Hillary] Clinton - apparently worked for her, rather than for all the Democratic Party candidates in an equal manner. I could never assume that anybody would find it interesting.
Something peculiar has happened. As I write, none of the Republican candidates for Senate has become a public embarrassment. On the contrary: For the first time in a decade, it is the Democratic candidates, not the Republican ones, who are fodder for late-night comics. That the Democrats are committing gaffes and causing scandals at a higher rate than Republicans not only may be decisive in the battle for the Senate. It could signal a change in our politics at large.
I would push myself so much that in the end I would collapse and I would have to be admitted to hospital, I would pray to God to save me, promise that I would be more careful in future. And then I would do it all over again.
In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse.
Politics is dirty. Politics is exciting. Politics is often very, very difficult and disappointing. And I really would rather the world would be a little more like it was when my dad was young, where you knew pretty much where people stood on the great moral issues.
I think my whole life had centered on Democratic politics. I was very much in that bubble. I worked in the Clinton administration so I had all these friends from there, and then in Democratic politics in New York, so that's what we sort of bonded over - that was our religion, to a certain extent.
Men in America were terrified that if women got an equal say in society, the system would collapse and their lives would be valued less. Whites in America were scared that if blacks obtained their freedom and equality, the system would collapse and their lives would be devalued. Heterosexuals are terrified that the psychotic institution of marriage will collapse if gays are given their right to marry. And humans are terrified that if animals are liberated and no longer viewed as inferior subordinates, human life will be valued less.
People are fed up with the politics where candidates just rip each other apart and then the voters lose in the end because no one really knows what anybody stands for.
Politics is not predictions and politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine.
In politics, all candidates and volunteers are ambassadors to voters who expect better than parroting the politics of personal destruction. Being able to find common ground at the higher ground is what separates the stateswoman from the stuntwoman.
The charade of politics is to make voters think that the personal narrative of the candidate affects the operation of the corporate state. It doesn't really matter on the fundamental issues whether the President is Republican or Democratic.
I would sign on for projects that were meant to shoot in July, and then they would postponed and they would bleed into the following semester, and then I'd take a semester off, and then the movie would collapse.
Jean [Kennedy Smith, JFK's sister] told me she thinks the whole sports angle has been overplayed, that politics was central to him. This nonsense that he only went into politics because his older brother Joe was killed is not true. He was determined he was going to be in politics, but he would have waited his turn.
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