I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ‘learning experience.’ Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ‘learning experience.’ It makes me feel less stupid.
P. J. O'ROURKETerm limits aren’t enough. We need jail.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.
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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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Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
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Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
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Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.
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The people who despise America are the editors of the ‘New Statesman.’ Their green-card applications must have been turned down.
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Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
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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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Global warming is a fact. Now it’s up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial importance in preventing powerful, greedy free market forces from getting in the way of worsening storms and rising sea levels. The Kyoto Accord is a good first step.
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The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.
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The baby boomers’ politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there’s been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.
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By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.
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The 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.
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Never fight an inanimate object.
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Call a man ‘ignorant,’ and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.
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You’re never going to read ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ and you shouldn’t, really. It’s 900 pages.
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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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The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.
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Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization – an appeal to civilization itself.
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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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There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees.
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People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.
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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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The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
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Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
P. J. O'ROURKE