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.
P. J. O'ROURKENo industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.
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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
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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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The budget doesn’t have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn’t have much control over the budget.
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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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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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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.
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If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til it’s free.
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The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.
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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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Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
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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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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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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.
P. J. O'ROURKE