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.
P. J. O'ROURKEAgriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
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Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
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If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.
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Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.
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Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
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There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees.
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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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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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The baby boomers’ politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there’s been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.
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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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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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Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
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Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
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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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We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
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There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It’s going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it’s the Democrats.
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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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The budget doesn’t have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn’t have much control over the budget.
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The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.
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Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.
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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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Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn’t exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.
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Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
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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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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.
P. J. O'ROURKE