P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.
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Generally it's not a good idea to wear Banana Republic - type khaki journalist clothes in a war zone. You might look too much like something that's supposed to be shot, such as a journalist.
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Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
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I'm not guaranteeing what we come up with will be better for the planet. There is ethanol, for instance, which actually nets out with more pollution at greater expense, and more harm to the environment than petroleum, but we'll come up with something.
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There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.
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There are a number of Americans who shouldn't vote. The number is 57 percent, to judge by the combined total of Clinton and Perot ballots in the 1996 presidential election.
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The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and health and retirement benefits working on the General Livestock Corporation assembly line putting udders on cows.
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I was never a Democrat. I went from Republican to Maoist and then back again.
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Health care's not about insurance! Health care's about getting treatment.
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Hunter S. Thompson and I are old friends, but what we do is so different. There are surface similarities that really have to do with us being frustrated poets.
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Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
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When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
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The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
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The purpose of the Senate is to keep 100 middle aged knuckleheads out of the private sector where they can do real harm.
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Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.
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Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.
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Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
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Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.
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When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.
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Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
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Soldiers are not policemen, and it's very unfair, even for those soldiers who have some police training, to burden them with police duties. It's not what they're trained for, or equipped for.
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In the Soviet Union, no industry went under until they all did.
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Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.
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Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.