If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.
P. J. O'ROURKEThe 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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As a former writer for the ‘National Lampoon,’ I’ve probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.
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Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
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Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.
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Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.
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Term limits aren’t enough. We need jail.
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You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.
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Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
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A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a promissory note that doesn’t actually promise anything. It’s not backed by gold or silver.
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Rich people don’t like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don’t go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.
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Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God’s infinite mercy, a last resort.
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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.
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Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn’t matter.
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I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.
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There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
P. J. O'ROURKE






