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d8155a9
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Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
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earth
save
dishes
help
mom
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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09ae2a7
|
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
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politics
humor
democrats
republicans
government
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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f6ca5ed
|
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child -- miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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31d574d
|
Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite pet. People like pets to possess the same qualities they do. Cats are irresponsible and recognize no authority, yet are completely dependent on others for their material needs. Cats cannot be made to do anything useful. Cat..
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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3ef1a2f
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The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors--psychology, sociology, women's studies--to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist ..
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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06eb9ce
|
A hat should be taken off when greeting a lady, and left off the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
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humor
manners
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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2391861
|
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet a..
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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944f362
|
It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.
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politics
government-spending
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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099caf6
|
I was having dinner...in London...when eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about "Your country's never been invaded." And so I said, "Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They're us. WE BE BAD. We're the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We're three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother's side. You take your Germany, France, and..
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politics
nationality
europeans
americans
culture
europe
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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7405568
|
When are the world's political parties going to get appropriate symbols: snake, louse, jackal, ... trash can, clown face, ... dollar bill with bat wings on it?
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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fd99255
|
The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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5711653
|
Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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4097151
|
The complexity of economics can be calculated mathematically. Write out the algebraic equation that is the human heart and multiply each unknown by the population of the world.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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1e09334
|
There's a joke people tell in the Soviet Union: Mitterrand, Bush and Gorbachev have a meeting with God. Mitterrand says, 'My country faces many difficult problems-- lagging exports, Muslim minorities, European unification. How long will it be before France's problems are solved?' God says, 'Fifteen years.' Mitterrand begins to cry. 'I'm an old man,' says Mitterrand. 'I'll be dead by then. I'll never see France's problems solved.' Then Bush ..
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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5837d40
|
Being gloomy is easier than being cheerful. Anybody can say "I've got cancer" and get a rise out of a crowd. But how many of us can do five minutes of good stand-up comedy? And worrying is less work than doing something to fix the worry. This is especially true if we're careful to pick the biggest possible problems to worry about. Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes."
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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bf370f7
|
The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things -- war and hunger and date rape -- liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, stro..
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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2f03ff5
|
Everyone with any sense and experience in life would rather take his fellows one by one than in a crowd. Crowds are noisy, unreasonable and impatient. They can trample you easier than a single person can. And a crowd will never buy you lunch.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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484c49b
|
If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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0bb3d23
|
No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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c2c933c
|
It's important to understand that in the Third World most driving is done with the horn, or "Egyptian Brake Pedal," as it is known. There is a precise and complicated etiquette of horn use. Honk your horn only under the following circumstances: 1. When anything blocks the road 2. When anything doesn't. 3. When anything might. 4. At red lights 5. At green lights. 6. At all other times."
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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7eb09cf
|
You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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ab76f7d
|
The Affordable Health Care for Americans Act, passed by the House of Representatives on November 7, 2009, was 1,990 pages long. You could stand on it to paint the ceiling. The entire U.S. Constitution can be printed on eight pages. That's eight pages to run a whole country for 221 years versus four reams of government pig latin if you slam your thumb in a car door.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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46ce5ab
|
What's important about morality in politics is us. We own the chicken farm. We must give our bird-brained, feather-headed politicians morals. Politicians love to think of themselves as "free-range" but they do not have the capacity to hunt or gather morals in the wild. If we fail to supply them with morality, politicians begin to act very scary in the barnyard. These are enormous headless chickens and they have nukes." --
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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9402c6d
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The bullying of citizens by means of dreads and fights has been going on since paleolithic times. Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than the tribal Wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. 'Oh no, Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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44ac0be
|
We are endowed with a moral capacity that animals, plants, rocks-and many fervent ecologists-lack. We should not be dirty, wasteful or cruel. To do so harms others. That's wrong. Therefore we don't disembowel Bambi like the way coyotes do, we shoot him first.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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feafdfd
|
Sucking the fun out of life has always been an important component of politics.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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c84df7a
|
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
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trust
luck
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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a83eb44
|
Nature will get rights as soon as it gets duties. The minute we see birds, trees, bugs, squirrels picking up litter, giving money to charity, and keeping an eye on our kids at the park, we'll let them vote.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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5f824be
|
We all know how 'modern democracies take loaves from the wealthy.' It's the slipups in the 'pass them out to the poor' department that inspire a study of Economics.
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socialism
redistribution-of-wealth
economics
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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2f27b43
|
Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.
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o-rourke
p-j
prertension
seriousness
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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6c006fe
|
If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.
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celebrity
celebrity-culture
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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21e8d4d
|
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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P.J. O'Rourke |
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3c53862
|
The free market is not a creed or an ideology that political conservatives, libertarians, and Ayn Rand acolytes want Americans to take on faith. The free market is simply a measurement. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That's all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can't pass a law making ..
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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385b329
|
Schneider has made a career of telling the public that the climate is going to change drastically, and indeed every spring and fall he's been right.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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3e9c3d1
|
A walk through an old graveyard shows our ancestors often had more dead children than we have live ones.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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ccc173e
|
The whole idea of government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
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greed
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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030bc5e
|
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.
|
|
politics
humor
democrats
republicans
government
|
P.J. O'Rourke |
|
2ab72e6
|
Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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03bb4fc
|
Twenty-five years from now all religion will be fundamentalist religion, even the Church of England. Wild-eyed "Tutuist" Anglicans will riot in Anzania (formerly the Union of South Africa). They'll force people to play contract bridge at gunpoint and make unbelievers eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. No woman will dare appear in the street without a small, stupid hat like Queen Di's."
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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ce39331
|
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
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washington-dc
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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247cc2b
|
The web is just a device by which bad ideas travel around the globe at the speed of light.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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e4d3120
|
You can't get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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c552b39
|
Politicians show no signs of even knowing the difference between negative and positive rights. Blinded by the dazzle of anything that makes them popular, they honestly may not be able to tell.
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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b55a891
|
If it's any comfort, we should remind ourselves of the purpose of voting. We don't vote to elect great persons to office. They're not that great. We vote to throw the bastards out.)
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P.J. O'Rourke |