Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.
P. J. O'ROURKEThe 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
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Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.
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In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
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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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Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I’ve been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.
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The best and brightest don’t go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
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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.
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Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.
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When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
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Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
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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.
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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 whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
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I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.
P. J. O'ROURKE