The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there’s a reason for that – the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent – No Child Left Behind.
P. J. O'ROURKEIn its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.
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The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren’t carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.
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Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
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Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
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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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There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money.
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Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let’s hope so.
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Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
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The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
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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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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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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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New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State’s registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they’re going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can’t understand what they say.
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The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.
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Regulation creates a moral hazard.
P. J. O'ROURKE