P. J. O'Rourke on seriousness
P. J. O'Rourke174 quotes“Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.”
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The budget doesn’t have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn’t have much control over the budget.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke 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.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke 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.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke 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?
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke 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.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I’ve been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren’t carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.
P. J. O'RourkeP. J. O'Rourke
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More on seriousness
If you are not serious, people will sense it.
Bela LugosiBela Lugosi What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Alan AyckbournAlan Ayckbourn Humor and seriousness are not in opposition to each other.
Al FrankenAl Franken Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused.
Agnes RepplierAgnes Repplier Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done.
Adam NicolsonAdam Nicolson What I intend to do is uphold a standard of intellectual seriousness on the right.
Adam BellowAdam Bellow The seriousness of my situation started to sink in, and again I fought panic. I pushed it down, but it was harder this time, like my insides were an open can of shaken soda and I was trying to keep it from bubbling up out of the top.
Abby SunderlandAbby Sunderland
