Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
P. J. O'ROURKEThank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I’ve been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
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Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.
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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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Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
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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.
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Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.
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You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.
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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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You’re never going to read ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ and you shouldn’t, really. It’s 900 pages.
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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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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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In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’
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Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
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A humorist doesn’t really do that much note-taking.
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Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
P. J. O'ROURKE