When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
P. J. O'ROURKEThe 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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.
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Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.
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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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Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.
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Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
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Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
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I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.
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Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
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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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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 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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Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
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Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn’t matter.
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A humorist doesn’t really do that much note-taking.
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The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
P. J. O'ROURKE






