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P. J. O'Rourke


American
November 14, 1947
Comedian
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Any terrorism is an attack on libertarian values.


P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Any Values Attack
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On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all.


P. J. O'Rourke
bell church sky religion
If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.


P. J. O'Rourke
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The purpose of sports - even foreign sports - is not to bore people.


P. J. O'Rourke
America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness - divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.
P. J. O'Rourke
Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Only Become Until
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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.


P. J. O'Rourke
Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation - as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Most Even Wealth
Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
P. J. O'Rourke
Everybody in America who didn't come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Who His Come
I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Like Had Which
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I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.


P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Home Like Love
TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Age Mean Far
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.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: War Future Had
The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Who Being Every
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.
P. J. O'Rourke
Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: People Who Know
Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Car You Who
As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Funny Get Than
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P. J. O'Rourke
Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it's got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It's not pretty. But it's striking, I'll give it that. It's not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Going Thing Got
A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Best Funny People
The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: You About More
In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Me Who More
There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Business You Life
I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Me Like Life
It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Poetry Very How
Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca's day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real-estate developments.
P. J. O'Rourke
Tags: Great Would Which