Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.
P. J. O'ROURKEThe body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can’t do, shouldn’t do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.
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The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry – knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission.
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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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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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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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There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
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As a former writer for the ‘National Lampoon,’ I’ve probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.
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Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
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When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he’s saving a parking place.
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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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People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.
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Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.
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Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
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I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.
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What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text.
P. J. O'ROURKE






