When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
P. J. O'ROURKEPreachers 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
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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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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
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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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Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
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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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You’re stupid,’ is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.
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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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Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.
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Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.
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America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being ‘hegemonistic’, of engaging in ‘unilateralism’, of behaving as if we’re the only nation on earth that counts. We are.
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There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It’s going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it’s the Democrats.
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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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Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.
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