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No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.


P. J. O'Rourke

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CATHERINE LACEY . . . overcast afternoons when it seemed possible the whole world had run out of things to say.
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CHRIS PRENTISS To say that a humorist exaggerates to get big laughs, I don't see how that's big news.
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ELON MUSK In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been wi...
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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