The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It’s a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.
P. J. O'ROURKEThe 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
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Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
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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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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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Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.
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Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
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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.
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People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.
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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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New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State’s registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they’re going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can’t understand what they say.
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Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.
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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.
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Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that’s when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
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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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Stupid is a great force in human affairs.
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America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
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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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Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
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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.
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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.
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My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow… he wasn’t evil or anything, but he was worthless.
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In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’
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You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.
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When I’m in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.
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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'ROURKE