There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
P. J. O'ROURKEAdam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let’s hope so.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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'ROURKE -
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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When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.
P. J. O'ROURKE