P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too.
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The neo-hippie-dips, the sentimentality-crazed iguana anthropomorphizers, the Chicken Littles, the three-bong-hit William Blakes- thank God these people don't actually go outdoors much, or the environment would be even worse than it is already.
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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.
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Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.
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The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.
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Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest.
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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 Italians have had two thousand years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place.
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I am unboreable in the great outdoors.
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I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.
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Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation’s capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.
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Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let's hope so.
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Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace.
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Demolishing pretensions, especially worthy ones, is a hallmark of the baby boom.
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Jimmy Carter was - he still - he remains to this day America's most ex of ex-presidents. You just can't believe that we elected this doofus. He was a bright enough guy and sort of well-meaning. But he was about as prepared to be president of the United States as your goofy old uncle, you know, the one that memorises baseball statistics.
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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.
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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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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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All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.
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Harvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage industry.
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The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer's cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.
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Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation - as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed.
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America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God.
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College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.