Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
P. J. O'ROURKEPolitics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
P. J. O'ROURKEWealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
P. J. O'ROURKEThere 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.
P. J. O'ROURKEBecause of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
P. J. O'ROURKEWhen elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he’s saving a parking place.
P. J. O'ROURKEPreachers 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.
P. J. O'ROURKEI come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.
P. J. O'ROURKEI believe in God. God created the world.
P. J. O'ROURKEI like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.
P. J. O'ROURKEThe 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'ROURKEWealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.
P. J. O'ROURKELet’s reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools – and use it on the teachers.
P. J. O'ROURKEThe 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'ROURKEThe 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'ROURKEBill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.
P. J. O'ROURKEAmerica 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.
P. J. O'ROURKE