Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.


P. J. O'Rourke

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES
Anger - a beast within us that needs taming.
SARU SINGHAL
I don't know if I have a favorite color.
KATE MIDDLETON
It's very special having a new little girl.
KATE MIDDLETON
Pastor Smith did not have the religious constitution needed to provide salvation for any of us who�...
CHERYL R COWTAN
I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It i...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Hard to restrain, unstable is this mind; it flits wherever it lists. Good it is to control the mind....
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
When each and every believer rises up to serve others and function according to their capacity, the ...
HENRY HON
At the end of the warehouse was a dais constructed from pallets of books: stack of vampire novels, w...
RICK RIORDAN
God created us in his image, male and female, with personhood and sexual passions, so that when he c...
JOHN PIPER
Who are we if not the stories we pass down? What happens when there's no one left to tell those stor...
CARRIE RYAN
And what good is a voice when so few will listen?
STACEY JAY
Trust In Every Words,
And You Will Believe In Your Works.
EIZZA ZAIZALNIZAM
Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in day out Success is the not the thing we will fi...
AAMIR SARFRAZ (AAMIR RAJPUT KHAN)
Yay!” Tyson went around the couches and gave everyone a big hug—even Octavian, who didn't look t...
RICK RIORDAN
Hazel!” he yelled. “That box! Open it!”
She hesitated, then saw the box he meant. Te labe...
RICK RIORDAN
If not for the horses, Piper would've died.
RICK RIORDAN
Pluto's pauldrons,” Reyna cursed.
RICK RIORDAN
Percy was getting tired of water.
If he said that aloud, he would probably get kicked out of Po...
RICK RIORDAN
If in barbed wire things can bloom, why couldn't I? I will not die, I will not die.
FRIEDL AND THE CHILDREN OF TEREZIN
We have within ourselves as a species, to find the beauty in everything. And once we master it, we w...
TOM ALTHOUSE
Each day before the end of eve
she sought her lover, nor would him leave,
until the stars ...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
What? You run? Coward! Stand still and die!”
Percy had no intention of doing that.
RICK RIORDAN
Smile is the shortest and fastest communication between strangers.
SARU SINGHAL
An Indigo Bunting let out a trill, a cheery song, reminding me of better days, of hope and happiness...
CHERYL R COWTAN
While Maddox now believed the demon did not want to hurt Ashlyn, he wasn't willing to take a chance....
GENA SHOWALTER
Your life today is the result of a series of decisions you made that have caused you to arrive where...
CHRIS PRENTISS
A strong personal philosophy does more than sustain us through the tragedies of life. It also stains...
CHRIS PRENTISS
The answers are never "out there." All the answers are "in there," inside you, waiting to be discove...
CHRIS PRENTISS
We pay a price for everything we get or take in this world; and although ambitions are well worth ha...
L.M. MONTGOMERY
Clay in the hands of a good potter suffers so many good turns, but in the end, we see its real and t...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
Gods of Olympus.” Piper stared at Leo. “What happened to you?”
His hair was grease...
RICK RIORDAN
Down in the water, Octavian yelled, “Get me out of here! I’ll kill you!”
“Tempting,” ...
RICK RIORDAN
Sometimes, the wicked will tell us things just to confuse us–to haunt our thoughts long after we'v...
SARAH J. MAAS
We still should have enough time to reach Rome.”
Hazel scowled. “When you say should hav...
RICK RIORDAN
This is Buford,” Leo announced.
“You name your furniture?” Frank asked.
RICK RIORDAN
He’d learned years ago it was better not to dwell too much on who was related to whom on the godly...
RICK RIORDAN
Did someone just call me the wine dude?” he asked in a lazy drawl. “It’s Bacchus, pleas...
RICK RIORDAN
Reyna looked at Percy without much hope. “You do have a plan?”
Percy wanted to step ...
RICK RIORDAN
Percy blinked. “So your brother is a winged horse. But you’re also my half brother, which means ...
RICK RIORDAN
I can’t believe how much this place has grown,” Hazel muttered.
The taxi driver grinned in...
RICK RIORDAN
It is no bad thing celebrating a simple life.
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
Though he walked and breathed, and about him living leaves and flowers were stirred by the same cool...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn't misuse it.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry a...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore... prove ultimate...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
I kiss the soil as if I placed a kiss on the hands of a mother, for the homeland is our earthly moth...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
The vow of celibacy is a matter of keeping one's word to Christ and the Church. a duty and a pro...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can ...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Love is never defeated, and I could add, the history of Ireland proves it.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and ...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Today, for the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome sets foot on English soil. This fair land, on...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressi...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not d...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Young people are threatened... by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural ...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law e...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
You will reciprocally promise love, loyalty and matrimonial honesty. We only want for you this day t...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
The future starts today, not tomorrow.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
The unworthy successor of Peter who desires to benefit from the immeasurable wealth of Christ feels ...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Marriage is an act of will that signifies and involves a mutual gift, which unites the spouses and b...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
The United Nations organization has proclaimed 1979 as the Year of the Child. Are the children to re...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Have no fear of moving into the unknown. Simply step out fearlessly knowing that I am with you, ther...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
There are people and nations, Mother, that I would like to say to you by name. I entrust them to you...
POPE JOHN PAUL II
I have a sweet tooth for song and music. This is my Polish sin.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
At the end of the day, it's all about money.
GARRY KASPAROV
Day by day we increase in age. Step by step we reduce the number of our steps. When you grow old, yo...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
All real programs contain errors until proved otherwise which is impossible.
PAUL DICKSON
Algren's Precepts: Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man named Doc. And...
PAUL DICKSON
Albrecht's Law: Social innovations tend to the level of minimum tolerable well being.
PAUL DICKSON
Ade's Law: Anybody can win--unless there happens to be a second entry.
PAUL DICKSON
Acting, First Rule of: Whatever happens, look as if you intended it to happen.
PAUL DICKSON
Acheson's Rule of Bureaucracy: A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the ...
PAUL DICKSON
Accuracy, Rule of, Corollary: Provided, of course, that you know there is a problem.
PAUL DICKSON
A clean tie attracts the soup of the day.
PAUL DICKSON
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again.
PAUL DICKSON
About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
PAUL DICKSON
Acton's Law: Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
PAUL DICKSON
Accuracy, Rule of: When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the ...
PAUL DICKSON
Rowe's Rule: the odds are five to six that the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of ...
PAUL DICKSON
Lieutenant Dunbar wasn't really swallowed. But that was the first word that stuck in his head.
MICHAEL BLAKE
A system tends to grow in complexity instead of simplicity, until the resulting unreliability becom...
PAUL DICKSON
Allen's Law of Civilization: It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be c...
PAUL DICKSON
Airplane Law, The: When the plane you are on is late, the plane you want to transfer to is on time...
PAUL DICKSON
Advice, First Law of: The correct advice to give is the advice that is desired.
PAUL DICKSON
Abrams's Advice: When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.
PAUL DICKSON
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
PAUL DICKSON
Allen's Law: Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.
PAUL DICKSON
Agnes Allen's Law: Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.
PAUL DICKSON
Abbott's Admonitions: (1) If you have to ask, you're not entitled to know. (2) If you don't like ...
PAUL DICKSON
A real person has two reasons for doing anything . . . a good reason and the real reason.
PAUL DICKSON
A free agent is anything but.
PAUL DICKSON
The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has ...
JOHN C. DANFORTH
The phrase ‘separation of church and state,’ which appears in no founding document (only in a le...
DENNIS PRAGER
Besides the danger of a direct mixture of religion and civil government, there is an evil which ough...
JAMES MADISON

More P. J. O'Rourke

Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on Ne...
P. J. O'ROURKE
A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.
J. P. MORGAN
When you expect things to happen - strangely enough - they do happen.
J. P. MORGAN
Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do ...
J. P. MORGAN
If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.
J. P. MORGAN
No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty...
J. P. MORGAN
I got disappointed in human nature as well and gave it up because I found it too much like my own.
J. P. DONLEAVY
To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.
J. P. DONLEAVY
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J. P. DONLEAVY
Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jur...
P. J. O'ROURKE
My mom is a sculptress.
P. J. HARVEY
I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels...
P. J. HARVEY
I've always felt that I'm affected by the world, by the way we treat each other, by the way ...
P. J. HARVEY
There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doi...
P. J. HARVEY
I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or ...
P. J. HARVEY
I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it's very ph...
P. J. HARVEY
I'm a very private person, so obviously I don't enjoy talking about more personal matters.
P. J. HARVEY
My father is actually a quarry man - he deals in stone. He also at one point had a lot of sheep, he ...
P. J. HARVEY
With songs I almost see the images, see the action, and then all I have to do is describe it. It'...
P. J. HARVEY
I decide immediately if I like a person and if I do, then I'm myself, and if I don't, then I...
P. J. HARVEY
I'm a Libra. That means that I can make a decision, but only after much thought.
P. J. HARVEY
There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their ...
P. J. HARVEY
People have a tendency to see country life through rose-colored glasses.
P. J. HARVEY
It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore...
P. J. HARVEY
Making me into a role model is placing too much importance on what I see as a work in progress.
P. J. HARVEY
I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. ...
P. J. HARVEY
I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like ...
P. J. HARVEY
There is nothing more boring than doing singing exercises.
P. J. HARVEY
People like Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain B...
P. J. HARVEY
I firmly disbelieve that one has to be a tortured soul to write good music.
P. J. HARVEY
I don't loathe interviews, I'm just one of those people who makes music because I find it di...
P. J. HARVEY
I think that's always very valuable: to keep the mind open to receiving all sorts of information...
P. J. HARVEY
I tried to use words that were dealing with the emotional quality that any human being could recogni...
P. J. HARVEY
I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, beca...
P. J. HARVEY
I've always been very visceral in that I feel things very deeply.
P. J. HARVEY
Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyon...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
P. J. O'ROURKE
In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky even...
P. J. O'ROURKE
People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that wa...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
P. J. O'ROURKE
I am unboreable in the great outdoors.
P. J. O'ROURKE
To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-work...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
P. J. O'ROURKE
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove t...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Guns are the ultimate bulwark against government misbehavior.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you k...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who i...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won't dig up the pr...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you're handing out plagues of darkness,...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let&#...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Life is just a dirty four-letter word: W-O-R-K.
J. P. MCEVOY
Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; ...
J. P. SENN
Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J. P. DONLEAVY
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to...
P. J. PLAUGER
In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, im...
P. J. O'ROURKE
When you don't have any money, the problem is food, When you have money, it's sex. When you have bot...
J. P. DONLEAVY
Nothing bad is going to happen to us. If we get fired, it's not failure; its a midlife vocational re...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why...
P. J. O'ROURKE
You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
P. J. O'ROURKE
People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic g...
P. J. O'ROURKE
I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste and style mixed together so that yo...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The principle feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad thin...
P. J. O'ROURKE
In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propa...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishmen...
P. J. O'ROURKE
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind ha...
P. J. O'ROURKE
When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin.
J. P. DONLEAVY
The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the s...
P. J. O'ROURKE
But Jesus, when you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When y...
J. P. DONLEAVY
Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and tho...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But -- like other precious, sacred things...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spou...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. The...
P. J. O'ROURKE
There's no telling what might have happened to our defense budget if Saddam Hussein hadn't invaded K...
P. J. O'ROURKE
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficu...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Some people are better imagined in one's bed than found there in the morning.
P. J. O'ROURKE
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice...
J. P. SENN
Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
P. J. O'ROURKE
A man always has two reasons for doing anything--a good reason and the real reason.
J. P. MORGAN
Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiv...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in th...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.
P. J. O'ROURKE
What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, becaus...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of prog...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-sh...
P. J. O'ROURKE
What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians - whatever those motives may be - is that politic...
P. J. O'ROURKE
I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
P. J. O'ROURKE
The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously inv...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs i...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Global warming is a fact. Now it's up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial i...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Upbeat is for people who want to feel good about their cause: the reformers, the progressives, the r...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, P...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the econ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
P. J. O'ROURKE
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A poli...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but moth...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.
P. J. O'ROURKE
The two most frightening words in Washington are 'bipartisan consensus.' Bipartisan consensu...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head c...
P. J. O'ROURKE
I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level...
P. J. O'ROURKE
A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.
J. P. MORGAN
People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.
P. J. O'ROURKE
The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry - knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wi...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Why do elites hate the poor? It's xenophobia. They don't know any poor people - except their...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools inst...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Disney's House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades...
P. J. O'ROURKE
All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.
P. J. O'ROURKE
The great apologist has to have lived large and wild. If he's going to kiss the world's boo-...
P. J. O'ROURKE
'Carrie' was a pretty big-budget movie at a real studio, with a director that had already do...
P. J. SOLES
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
Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Jimmy Carter was - he still - he remains to this day America's most ex of ex-presidents. You jus...
P. J. O'ROURKE
There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a cer...
P. J. O'ROURKE
In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is mo...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Everybody with a gun has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, you'd be crazy not to have a g...
P. J. O'ROURKE
A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It's a promissory note that doesn't a...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The baby boomers' politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground t...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted a...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Of course, no one wants to ban the vote. Voting should remain available for sporting and recreationa...
P. J. O'ROURKE
You're not a baby boomer if you don't have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King a...
P. J. O'ROURKE
You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to t...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men be...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in...
P. J. O'ROURKE
We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
I'm on Medicare now. If I go and have a big operation, it costs me nothing. It should cost me a ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been s...
P. J. HARVEY
Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see farther.
J. P. MORGAN
Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blas...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the l...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's u...
P. J. O'ROURKE
As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, R...
P. J. O'ROURKE
What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding de...
P. J. O'ROURKE
There are a number of Americans who shouldn't vote. The number is 57 percent, to judge by the co...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitche...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled...
P. J. O'ROURKE
If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, Wo...
P. J. O'ROURKE
You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don'...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Northwest Ohio is flat. There isn't much up. The land is so flat that a child from Toledo is und...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
P. J. O'ROURKE
A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?'
P. J. O'ROURKE
Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the sche...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
P. J. O'ROURKE
If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I'd claim it w...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Detroit's industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.
P. J. O'ROURKE
I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bl...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway inste...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Kids are disorganized.
P. J. O'ROURKE
People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it's the lowering of trade barriers th...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J P DONLEAVY
Inside every Sancho Panza there's a Don Quixote struggling to get out.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box.
P. J. O'ROURKE
In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a popu...
P. J. O'ROURKE
There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it's got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. I...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the Dist...
P. J. O'ROURKE
It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with...
P. J. O'ROURKE
I'm too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom's earring in h...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.
P. J. O'ROURKE
Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefull...
P. J. O'ROURKE
I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a learning experience. Then again, I like to think ...
P. J. O'ROURKE
The purpose of a funeral service is to comfort the living. It is important at a funeral to display e...
P. J. O'ROURKE
There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-...
P. J. O'ROURKE
With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today...
P. J. O'ROURKE
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are le...
P. J. O'ROURKE
Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and ...
P. J. O'ROURKE