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.
P. J. O'ROURKEThere is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Let’s reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools – and use it on the teachers.
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Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.
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The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
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If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til it’s free.
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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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If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it’s a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also – to do the lawn and clean the gutters.
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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.
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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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The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.
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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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Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
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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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America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being ‘hegemonistic’, of engaging in ‘unilateralism’, of behaving as if we’re the only nation on earth that counts. We are.
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Thank 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.
P. J. O'ROURKE