There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
P. J. O'ROURKEThank 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.
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Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
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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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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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Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
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Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
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Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
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The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there’s a reason for that – the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent – No Child Left Behind.
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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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Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.
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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.
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I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I’m not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.
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Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.
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Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that’s when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
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Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.
P. J. O'ROURKE