When you’re a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, ‘Gee, I wouldn’t want to be doing that.’ They’re on your side.
P. J. O'ROURKEAmerica 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
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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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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.
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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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Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
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They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, ‘But doesn’t it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn’t it be set in New Guinea?’ And you say, ‘But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.’
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Stupid is a great force in human affairs.
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It’s better to make fun of yourself because you’ve always got someone around to make fun of, and they can’t sue you.
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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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Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.
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Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.
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Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
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Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
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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.
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Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I’ve been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.
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Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.
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Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
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Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
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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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Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
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Never fight an inanimate object.
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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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Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
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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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Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
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Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they’re right.
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