The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.
P. J. O'ROURKEHead lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn’t exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
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People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.
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I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.
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Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
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Let’s reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools – and use it on the teachers.
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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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Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
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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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Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
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The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
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I believe in God. God created the world.
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The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
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When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
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Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
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You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.
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Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.
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The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there’s a reason for that – the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent – No Child Left Behind.
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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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The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can’t do, shouldn’t do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.
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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
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A humorist doesn’t really do that much note-taking.
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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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They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, ‘But doesn’t it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn’t it be set in New Guinea?’ And you say, ‘But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.’
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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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There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It’s going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it’s the Democrats.
P. J. O'ROURKE