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'ROURKEGovernment is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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A humorist doesn’t really do that much note-taking.
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If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
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If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.
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Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How’d they get so rich? Because they’re free.
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Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.
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Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
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The most brilliant satire of all time was ‘A Modest Proposal’ by Jonathan Swift. You’ll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.
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What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text.
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I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.
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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.
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Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.
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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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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.
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I’ve got a 1990 Porsche 911. It’s just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love 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.
P. J. O'ROURKE