A fundamental American question is, ‘What’s the big idea?’
P. J. O'ROURKEPolitics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the ’70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.
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The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can’t do, shouldn’t do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.
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Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.
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Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
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Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
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Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they’re right.
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If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.
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The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.
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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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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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I’m too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom’s earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.
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Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
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I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.
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The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
P. J. O'ROURKE