P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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No government proposal more complicated than 'This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private' ever works.
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All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.
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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.
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If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I'd claim it was forced on our country by a sinister international organization.
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Money is preferable to politics. It is the difference between being free to be anybody you want and to vote for anybody you want. And money is more effective than politics both in solving problems and in providing individual independence. To rid ourselves of all the trouble in the world, we need to make money. And to make money, we need to be free.
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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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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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We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren't there.
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The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborghini to the Grand Prix track to watch the charter buses race.
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I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.
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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.
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Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.
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Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.
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A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
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Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
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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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Affirmative action makes employers think, 'Black woman nuclear physicist? Hah! Probably let her into Harvard 'cause they were looking for a twofer. Bet she got C's in high school practical math. Give her a job in personnel.'
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I'm fascinated by political enthusiasm.
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I'm too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom's earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.
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The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.
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My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.
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One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
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Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.
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The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.