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.
P. J. O'ROURKEThere is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.
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Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.
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Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.
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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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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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The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
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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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No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it’s probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.
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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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Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
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We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
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Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.
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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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The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
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Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.
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