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.
P. J. O'ROURKEThe idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry – knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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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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The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
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What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text.
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There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.
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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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I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
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Never wear anything that panics the cat.
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No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.
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All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.
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Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.
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The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry – knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission.
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Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
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There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
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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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Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
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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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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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Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.
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Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
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I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.
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Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.
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Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.
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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
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In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
P. J. O'ROURKE