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When you're a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't want to be doing that.' They're on your side.
P. J. O'Rourke -
I don't understand anything about America's culture.
P. J. O'Rourke
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I covered the Lebanese civil war. I could see a place that had once been prosperous and now was impoverished. I'm not seeing that in America.
P. J. O'Rourke -
Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
P. J. O'Rourke -
Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.
P. J. O'Rourke -
America is the world's policeman, all right -- a big, dumb, mick flatfoot in the middle of the one thing cops dread most, a "domestic disturbance.
P. J. O'Rourke -
There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.
P. J. O'Rourke -
College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.
P. J. O'Rourke
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I don't even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I've never used a computer.
P. J. O'Rourke -
The problem isn't a Congress that won't cut spending or a president who won't raise taxes. The problem is an American public with a bottomless sense of entitlement to federal money.
P. J. O'Rourke -
One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.
P. J. O'Rourke -
If a journalist shows a facility for praise he's liable to be offered a job in public relations or advertising and the next thing you know he's got a big office, a huge salary and is living in a fine home with a lovely wife and swell kids - another career blown to hell.
P. J. O'Rourke -
Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.
P. J. O'Rourke -
Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.
P. J. O'Rourke
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The bar is set pretty low if you want to be a hip, accessible conservative.
P. J. O'Rourke -
Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.
P. J. O'Rourke -
I'm fascinated by political enthusiasm.
P. J. O'Rourke -
To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.
P. J. O'Rourke -
The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborghini to the Grand Prix track to watch the charter buses race.
P. J. O'Rourke -
When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.
P. J. O'Rourke
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The First Amendment only says 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' It can disrespect all it wants.
P. J. O'Rourke -
My life would have gone along perfectly well, politically speaking, if it hadn't been for girls.
P. J. O'Rourke -
The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.
P. J. O'Rourke -
My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.
P. J. O'Rourke