P. J. O'Rourke quotes

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

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• funny

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People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.

• people

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The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?

• administration

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There's one more terrifying fact about old people: I'm going to be one soon.

• fact

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They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, 'But doesn't it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn't it be set in New Guinea?' And you say, 'But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.'

• love

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Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.

• people

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Why do elites hate the poor? It's xenophobia. They don't know any poor people - except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don't speak English.

• hate

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Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.

• black

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I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.

• people

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People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.

• angry

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Liberals consider people to be nuisances.

• people

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There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.

• people

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Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.

• people

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We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren't there.

• election

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People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.

• people

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The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

• politics

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The foundation of collectivism is simple: There should be no important economic differences among people. No one should be too rich.

• simple

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Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.

• people

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Rich people don't like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don't go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.

• terrorism

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Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.

• crazy

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There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.

• money

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If you spend 72 hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. Either that or you're President Obama.

• people

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People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it's the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.

• people

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I think the Baby Boom does have a tendency to get its nose in everything. The Greatest Generation had a better tendency to leave people alone. Of course, they also had a better tendency to hate everybody's guts.

• alone

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What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.

• people

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Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jury duty.

• people

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People love to be told what they know already.

• love

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

• politics

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Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples.

• live

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The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that's the point.

• people

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More people quotes or go to table of contents

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

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• politics

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Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.

• 1
• politics

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Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

• face

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The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.

• politics

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The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.

• politics

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Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.

• politics

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

• politics

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The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

• politics

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The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.

• politics

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The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin.

• politics

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

• politics

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The baby boomers' politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there's been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.

• politics

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If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words 'I don't know.'

• life

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Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.

• politics

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Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.

• politics

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Politics won't allow for the truth.

• politics

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Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.

• politics

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I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.

• politics

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Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do.

• life

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Politics is the one field you don't age out of.

• politics

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The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.

• life

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Politics is - once in a while - a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.

• politics

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Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?

• politics

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No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.

• success

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There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans: race and religion.

• politics

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Space has always been confusing to politics.

• politics

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In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'

• change

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More politics quotes or go to table of contents

Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.

• world

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Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.

• black

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Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.

• world

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The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.

• world

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Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let's hope so.

• hope

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There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.

• love

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I believe in God. God created the world.

• god

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If you spend 72 hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. Either that or you're President Obama.

• people

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Call a man 'ignorant,' and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.

• knowledge

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The idea of a world where all people are alike - in wealth or in anything else - is a fantasy for the stupid.

• people

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There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.

• women

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There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is - certainly is one of them. But it's low on my list.

• change

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One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.

• history

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We've come into the world of '1984,' but it turns out to be '1984'-Lite.

• world

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We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.

• world

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Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.

• people

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Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.

• hate

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I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper.

• live

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Jack Abramoff is the world's best lobbyist - for the Federal Penitentiary System.

• best

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The great apologist has to have lived large and wild. If he's going to kiss the world's boo-boos and make up, he'd better plant some bruises first. A master apologizer has to be a Lord Byron, a Rick in Casablanca, a Lee Atwater, anyway.

• world

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There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency, and scoreless sports ties are boring.

• sports

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More world quotes or go to table of contents

The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?

• administration

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I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a "learning experience." Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a "learning experience." It makes me feel less stupid.

• trouble

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Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.

• home

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I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.

• people

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If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.

• health

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People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.

• people

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Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.

• think

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I think every high school student who was alert during the early '60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.

• school

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I think the Baby Boom does have a tendency to get its nose in everything. The Greatest Generation had a better tendency to leave people alone. Of course, they also had a better tendency to hate everybody's guts.

• alone

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I think it's always easy to be sympathetic to parts of the government in detail; in their concrete manifestations. Because obviously, we don't have government for no reason.

• think

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Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.

• ignorance

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Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

• thinking

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I don't think anybody's really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory.

• think

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I think the Baby Boom has enjoyed itself, maybe sometimes a little too much, and we're continuing to enjoy ourselves, maybe a little too much.

• think

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I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.

• politics

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I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.

• funny

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America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God.

• god

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I have no idea if some societies, anthropologically speaking, aren't really suited for democracy. I don't think that's true.

• democracy

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Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.

• black

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You can't destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America's elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you're doing us a favor.

• time

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More think quotes or go to table of contents

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.

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• greet

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Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.

• life

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A person has got to balance work and life and family in order to be a balanced person.

• life

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I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.

• life

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Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.

• life

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A deadly sins addendum is long overdue. Life has changed since Pope Gregory the Great scribbled his initial list in the sixth century.

• life

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Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that brightens life.

• life

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If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words 'I don't know.'

• life

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There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.

• life

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My life would have gone along perfectly well, politically speaking, if it hadn't been for girls.

• life

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Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do.

• life

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The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.

• life

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More life quotes or go to table of contents