P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

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People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'

P. J. O'Rourke
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People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'

P. J. O'Rourke
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I went to Iceland in 1861 and went over nearly every bit of the ground made famous by the adventures of Grettir.

Sabine Baring-Gould
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This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' narrative): both wars were about the country's survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th.... Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.

George Packer
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When we comprehend how few wars have ever been fought for the sake of justice or the people; how personal spite, the ambition of military professionals, and the protection of capitalistic ventures are the real moving powers...then the mythology of war will no longer bring us to our knees.

Rauschenbusch Walter 1861-1918
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It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is in the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than I import into it.

Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861
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But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.

Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 9: 1861
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What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances that satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet And Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70
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No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet And Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70
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There is a faculty in man that will acknowledge the unseen. He may scout and scare religion from him; but if he does, superstition perches near.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet And Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70
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Places change imperceptibly – in detail, at least – a good deal,' said the Doctor, making an effort to keep up a conversation that plainly would not go on itself; 'and people too; population shifts – there's an old fellow, sir, they call Death.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet And Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70
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