I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.
P. J. O'ROURKEEverybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they’re right.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
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People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it’s simply a measurement.
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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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The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.
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The 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.
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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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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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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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Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
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The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It’s a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
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Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
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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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Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
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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.’
P. J. O'ROURKE






