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"Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease."
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Exlpore more Pragmatism quotes
"Idealism that makes no distinction between areas where our national interest lies and those from which it is remote does no good for America. The weariness of the post-Versailles, post-Korea, post-Vietnam eras is never far from the national mood."
"A lie that could help someone focus on his life was better than a hundred simple truths."
"Fair play is all well and good. But knowing how to kick 'em in the balls can get you out of a jam 9 times out of 10."
"I've found that lifting the lid with your foot is the most thorough and least gross path to two minutes of peace of mind."
"High towers, and metaphysically-great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, does not signify something passing beyond all experience, but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible."
"Her philosophy was, if it had a pulse, it could be killed. I didn't really have a philosophy, but I could see how talking with the school director would be difficult for her. If he said something she didn't like, chopping him to tiny pieces wouldn't exactly help me get into the school."
"Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum."
"It is better to be a pragmatist than a lunatic."
"Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering."
"The really essential factors of success in any undertaking are money and opportunity, and as a rule, the man who can make the first can make the second."
Explore more quotes by P. J. O'Rourke
"A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat."
"Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum."
"The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics."
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