P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.
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Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?
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There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.
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One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you're not in the Army.
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Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren't present.
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Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?
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Voting has proliferated in the United States, and it has reached a point where there is now almost one vote available per citizen over the age of eighteen.
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When I left the Lampoon, I went west to try that out, and discovered that I hated it.They were awful people turning out awful product .
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We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
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One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.
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Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.
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Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
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To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.
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Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.
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The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay.
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War diminishes both civil and economic rights.
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I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a 'learning experience.' It makes me feel less stupid.
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Disney's House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war.
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Everybody in America who didn't come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.
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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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Philosophy was once considered science.
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In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America.
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Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.
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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.