P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
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Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree.
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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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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
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Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there.
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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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We've come into the world of '1984,' but it turns out to be '1984'-Lite.
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I am no stranger to loud noise. I've been to a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels concert. I once dated a woman with two kids.
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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.
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War diminishes both civil and economic rights.
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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.
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The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they're living.
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Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.
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Writing is agony. I hate it.
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The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It's a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.
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I have never Twittered or Tweeted or even Chirped.
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The job of the president of the United States is to talk to the public, is to explain to them. Now, some presidents talk too much, like Bill Clinton. Some presidents try to talk but don't know how, like George Bush senior.
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Politics is - once in a while - a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.
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If you want to join the Republican party, they have to let you in. There's nothing they can do about it. I mean, if Republicans will take Al D'Amato, they'll take anybody.
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I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.
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A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you're managing the U.S. Mint, buy a penny.
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The baby boomers' politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there's been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.
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Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
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Everybody in America who didn't come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.