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'ROURKEIt’s better to make fun of yourself because you’ve always got someone around to make fun of, and they can’t sue you.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
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Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.
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Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
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Never fight an inanimate object.
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No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.
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There 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.
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The budget doesn’t have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn’t have much control over the budget.
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Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let’s hope so.
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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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Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
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Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
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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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Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
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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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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.
P. J. O'ROURKE