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.
P. J. O'ROURKEPolitics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
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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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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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Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.
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Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
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Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.
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You’re stupid,’ is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.
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Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
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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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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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People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it’s simply a measurement.
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Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
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Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
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If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til it’s free.
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By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.
P. J. O'ROURKE