P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.
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A dugout is much superior to a conventional manufactured canoe because you can get soaking wet without bothering to capsize it.
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Freedom is for fun.
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If the politics of disease are to be understood, particularly in the dreadful countries where this understanding is most needed, then the politics of total collapse have to be understood first.
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The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society's ills can be cured politically. It's like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried.
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A deadly sins addendum is long overdue. Life has changed since Pope Gregory the Great scribbled his initial list in the sixth century.
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The American political system is like fast food - mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things and everybody wants some.
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Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer. We can just step off the sidewalk. And sometimes we can get impressionable members of the opposite sex to perform sacramental rites with us. 'Every drop of water wasted is a drop less of a wild and scenic river, Jennifer. We'd better double up in the shower.'
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Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.
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The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.
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Even newlyweds don't spend much time together, now that few marriages outlast the appliance warranties.
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A child growing up in an excessively safe environment may never learn that he is one - not until he gets married and has a wife to tell him so.
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It's hard to come back from the Balkans and not sound like a Pete Seeger song.
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The foundation of collectivism is simple: There should be no important economic differences among people. No one should be too rich.
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When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... This violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.
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In 1970 or '71, early in the magazine, Michael O'Donoghue did maybe eight pages of a 1958 yearbook, from Ezra Taft Benson High School. But by the time the [book-length] high-school yearbook came around, he didn't want to be involved.
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I'm here as a radio journalist but am not even sure which part of a tape recorder takes the pictures.
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I figured if I could put together being funny about stuff and actual events, maybe I could do something that wasn't being done much. Because the reporters that I met out there were funny, and they had hilarious stories that just didn't fit in the AP/UPI/New York Times foreign-correspondent style. They couldn't use the things they had. But I could.
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What would be a road hazard anywhere else, in the Third World is probably the road.
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China is trying to become America without democracy while America is trying to become France without cheese calories.
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One thing that's certain about going outdoors: When you come back inside, you'll be scratching.
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I was never in the office [of Rolling Stone]. It was very different from Lampoon, where we spent a lot of time together socially, which is to say "drunk."
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[Wave of bestselling conservative commentators] it's kind of like reading The Power Of Positive Thinking, or any other advice or how-to book. All they do is reassure people of their basic opinions, and then they can continue to act like they've always acted. I'd say it's time to move on to something else, but I don't know what it would be.
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Feminism is the result of a few ignorant and literal-minded women letting the cat out of the bag about which is the superior sex. Once women made it public that they could do things better than men, they were, of course, forced to do them.