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P. J. O'Rourke -
Parliament of Whores (1991)
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The Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.
P. J. O'Rourke
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This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans.
P. J. O'Rourke
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If we do our deficit spending on weapons, at least we get weapons. Then if we need weapons, we have them. If we don't need them, no harm is done.
P. J. O'Rourke
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The Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns'n'Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance brokerin America who owns a pair of white shoes.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer -- a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.
P. J. O'Rourke
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In Washington journalists can afford to live almost as well as people who work for a living.
P. J. O'Rourke
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A compromise in the sense that being bitten in half by a shark is a compromise with being swallowed whole.
P. J. O'Rourke
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During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?
P. J. O'Rourke
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God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations.
P. J. O'Rourke
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To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Nothing bad is going to happen to us. If we get fired, it's not failure; its a midlife vocational reassessment.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And — since women are a majority of the population — we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.
P. J. O'Rourke
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There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
P. J. O'Rourke
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How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?
P. J. O'Rourke
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Marilyn Quayle was there, too, looking – it was indeed a strange week in Washington – great. She had her hair done up in something my wife said was a chignon, and whatever it was, it made Marilyn look considerably less like a Cape buffalo than usual. Though actually I admired the Cape buffalo look. I have an idea that – like a Cape buffalo – if Marilyn Quayle gets furious and charges, you've got only one shot at the skull. You wouldn't want to just wound her.
P. J. O'Rourke
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There's one more terrifying fact about old people: I'm going to be one soon.
P. J. O'Rourke
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There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.
P. J. O'Rourke
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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.
P. J. O'Rourke
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I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about 'character issues'. Either that or just go ahead and determine the presidency with three-legged races and pie-eating contests. It would make better TV.
P. J. O'Rourke
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The Three Branches of Government: Money, Television, and Bullshit
P. J. O'Rourke
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Quote of the day
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Edvard Munch
P. J. O'Rourke
Creative Commons
Born:
November 14, 1947
Died:
February 15, 2022
(aged 74)
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