Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
P. J. O'ROURKEHubris is one of the great renewable resources.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.
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We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
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You’re never going to read ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ and you shouldn’t, really. It’s 900 pages.
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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.
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Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
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Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
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The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there’s a reason for that – the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent – No Child Left Behind.
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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.
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Never fight an inanimate object.
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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.
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To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You’d better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.
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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.
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There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.
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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
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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.
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Never wear anything that panics the cat.
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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.
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The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
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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.
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Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization – an appeal to civilization itself.
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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.
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The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.
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As a former writer for the ‘National Lampoon,’ I’ve probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.
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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.
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Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn’t exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.
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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.
P. J. O'ROURKE