Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
P. J. O'ROURKEI’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money.
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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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Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware.
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Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.
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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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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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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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I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.
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Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
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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.
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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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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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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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I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.
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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.
P. J. O'ROURKE