Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
P. J. O'ROURKEThe C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
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Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that’s when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
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Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
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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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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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You can’t destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America’s elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you’re doing us a favor.
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Stupid is a great force in human affairs.
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Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
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Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren’t present.
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The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.
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People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.
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Never wear anything that panics the cat.
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In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’
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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.
P. J. O'ROURKE