Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.
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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The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?
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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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Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God’s infinite mercy, a last resort.
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Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they’re right.
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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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A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
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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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Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.
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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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America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
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Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization – an appeal to civilization itself.
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There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.
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The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that’s the point.
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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.
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There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
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In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’
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Call a man ‘ignorant,’ and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.
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Never wear anything that panics the cat.
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The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
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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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The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
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Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
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Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
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Stupid is a great force in human affairs.
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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
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I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.
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