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.
P. J. O'ROURKEAmerica wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.
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Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
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Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
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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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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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The people who despise America are the editors of the ‘New Statesman.’ Their green-card applications must have been turned down.
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No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it’s probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.
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Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
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I’m too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom’s earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.
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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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Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.
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Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.
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I believe in God. God created the world.
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Term limits aren’t enough. We need jail.
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Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.
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Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
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Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.
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The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
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By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.
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All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.
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If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.
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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.
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Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.
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I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
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If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til it’s free.
P. J. O'ROURKE