The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
P. J. O'ROURKEThere 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
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Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
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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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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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I believe in God. God created the world.
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I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.
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I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
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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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Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
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Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.
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A fundamental American question is, ‘What’s the big idea?’
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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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The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.
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Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God’s infinite mercy, a last resort.
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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.
P. J. O'ROURKE






