Rich people don’t like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don’t go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.
P. J. O'ROURKEYou’re stupid,’ is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.
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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
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The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
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I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.
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The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.
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Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
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Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
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Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
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The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that’s the point.
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Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.
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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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Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.
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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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When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he’s saving a parking place.
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The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.
P. J. O'ROURKE