FastSaying

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.


P. J. O'Rourke

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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...
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J. P. DONLEAVY To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.
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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.
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P. J. HARVEY There is nothing more boring than doing singing exercises.
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P. J. HARVEY I firmly disbelieve that one has to be a tortured soul to write good music.
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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.
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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...
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P. J. O'ROURKE Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
P. J. O'ROURKE Guns are the ultimate bulwark against government misbehavior.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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P. J. O'ROURKE Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind ha...
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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.
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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