A humorist doesn’t really do that much note-taking.
P. J. O'ROURKEIf government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
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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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Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
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We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
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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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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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There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
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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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Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization – an appeal to civilization itself.
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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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You’re stupid,’ is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.
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Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
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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.
P. J. O'ROURKE