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'ROURKEYou 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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.
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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
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A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a promissory note that doesn’t actually promise anything. It’s not backed by gold or silver.
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Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.
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Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren’t present.
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Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
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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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There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees.
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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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I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.
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Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
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Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.
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When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he’s saving a parking place.
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Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.
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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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By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.
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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.
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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.
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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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Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
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Global warming is a fact. Now it’s up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial importance in preventing powerful, greedy free market forces from getting in the way of worsening storms and rising sea levels. The Kyoto Accord is a good first step.
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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.
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I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.
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I read good. I was an English major.
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Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
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Never fight an inanimate object.
P. J. O'ROURKE