P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.
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Harvard is the home of American ideas.
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We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
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When you pay a hospital bill, you're really paying two hospital bills - one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital. and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital.
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Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jury duty.
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Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.
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There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency, and scoreless sports ties are boring.
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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.
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Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.
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The two most frightening words in Washington are 'bipartisan consensus.' Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.
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Harvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage industry.
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I don't understand anything about America's culture.
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The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.
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Then Saturday Night Live spawns... well, everything right down to American Pie 9, where all humor has to be irrelevant, which can get a little tiring.
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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.
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Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.
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We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.
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I am unboreable in the great outdoors.
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After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States.
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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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Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box.
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If the Japanese want to be taken seriously as world financial powers, they'd better quit using the same tailor as variety show chimps.
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The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life - this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot.