Why can't death - if we must have it - be always glorious, as in 'The Iliad?'
P. J. O'Rourke
Related
I can tell you that you will have your hearts broken more by the people you love than by the people ...
MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX Are you taking us to the beach?" - Dan Cahill
JUDE WATSON Let's head out to the ruins." - Dan Cahill
ROLAND SMITH It looks ancient," - Amy Cahill
JUDE WATSON It SMELLS ancient," - Dan Cahill
JUDE WATSON Palm trees were fanned by a warm, light breeze, and they rolled down their windows to smell the sea.
JUDE WATSON About f-f-ace!" she said to the horse, flailing with her boots. "Into the barn, please. It's time fo...
PETER LERANGIS You see?" Damien leaned over his desk and spread out half a dozen charcoal sketches. "These are only...
RICK RIORDAN If you have a success in your life, why can't we hold on to that? Why can't that be good eno...
JAKE PALTROW I've got a few ideas," (Amy) admitted. "But I don't know where we're going in the long term. I mean ...
RICK RIORDAN Alas, I think I am becoming a god.
TITUS Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.
LUCAN I have a wife, I have sons: all of them hostages given to fate.
LUCAN Don't have to see," the pilot grunted. "Olga knows the way."
"Funny name for an aircraft...
GORDON KORMAN Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
SENECA Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.
SENECA We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing.
SENECA Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take...
SENECA Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
SENECA Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.
SENECA Friendship always benefits; love sometimes injures.
SENECA I always find Victoria's Secret models a bit weird.
EDIE CAMPBELL As a professional climber, that's the question you always get: Why, why, why? It's an ineffa...
JIMMY CHIN You must do as your people do. If my people are poor, I must be poor. People ask me, 'Why don...
HAILE GEBRSELASSIE I'm still a big 'Grey's Anatomy' fan.
BROOKE ELLIOTT I used to watch 'Grey's Anatomy' pretty religiously.
ERINN HAYES We're in the dark ages if J-Lo can have a music career because of her ass. And let's face it...
JACK BLACK I don't always wear underwear. When I'm in the heat, especially, I can't wear it. Like, ...
NAOMI CAMPBELL People don't ever have to starve to death; there are solutions. We have failed if we can't e...
CORETTA SCOTT KING Everything in life can be tiring and tiresome if we don't have the ability to look at it as if i...
ERIC-EMMANUEL SCHMITT If there's anything you absolutely hate, why, it must be unconstitutional. Or, if there's an...
ANTONIN SCALIA To me, unconventional thinking is approaching a problem and asking, 'Why not? Why can't some...
ELI BROAD People always ask, 'Man, why don't you come out and enjoy it? Why don't you celebrate? W...
J. J. WATT It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Ilia...
CHANG-RAE LEE As I grew up, I always refused to cook Indian food very vehemently, and to this day, I don't coo...
GURINDER CHADHA Design certainly has a cosmetic, aesthetic aim. It always aims at making things beautiful. But relev...
YVES BEHAR It used to be presumed that if you weren't at your desk working, you weren't working, But we...
DAVID CHIPPERFIELD I was looking for a name with an old English sound, very easy to pronounce in every language and eas...
DIEGO DELLA VALLE I can't let my mother's death have been in vain. Democracy is the best revenge, and we will ...
BILAWAL BHUTTO ZARDARI I'm not saying that what the radio plays isn't good. My issue is with what they don't pl...
DJ JAZZY JEFF If we don't know life, how can we know death?
CONFUCIUS Why can't we build orphanages next to homes for the elderly? If someone were sitting in a rocker...
CLORIS LEACHMAN Wouldn't it be awesome if we had a jetpack that wasn't a death trap? The problem is that it ...
ASTRO TELLER We can't take climate change and put it on the back burner. If we don't address climate chan...
CONRAD ANKER I feel very honoured and humbled to have people think, 'If Yuna can break through, then why can&...
YUNA If I hadn't gone to Stanford, I'd be working at P&G now.
VICTOR KOO I don't know if you guys have ever kissed anybody in real life, but it doesn't always go as ...
JORDAN GAVARIS I always loved cars. I don't know why, I can't explain it to you. It has always been with me...
CARLOS GHOSN We'll have to marshal our forces in Washington. It won't be easy. That doesn't mean it c...
ZEV YAROSLAVSKY If women can be railroad workers in Russia, why can't they fly in space?
VALENTINA TERESHKOVA Finally, strategy must have continuity. It can't be constantly reinvented.
MICHAEL PORTER I don't think that I would always be asked about my feelings about liberal bias in the media if ...
DANA PERINO The 'Iliad' covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other ...
ADRIENNE MAYOR I can't beleive I'm here to tell the tale, this was my first brush with death, and God must ...
SAMANTHA FOX If we can't have exchanges with our friends and family, with loved ones that won't at some p...
TIMOTHY D. SNYDER When you're in comedy, people always come up and say, 'Oh, it must be so hard.' It reall...
JERRY SEINFELD If they can't do it in California, it can't be done anywhere.
TAYLOR CALDWELL I don't know why 'happy' can't be a story.
FAITH HILL Death can't be considered because, if you're afraid to die, there's no room in your life...
JAMES DEAN I can't explain chemistry. I really can't. I haven't got a clue what it's all about....
ELAINE STRITCH Why can't a seven-foot guy play a doctor? Why can't I be a teacher? Why can't I be a foo...
GRIZZ CHAPMAN Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can't really understand why it doesn't obsess everyone - I...
J. K. ROWLING It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odys...
RAYMOND QUENEAU You can't always have the best team. It's always a compromise.
ALAIN PROST As Americans, we have traditionally been the optimists sporting the 'can-do' attitude. But w...
PAUL TONKO It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if we didn't have a salary cap.
JERRY JONES I don't think that everything on Broadway relates to us, and I think that's why we as black ...
STEPHANIE MILLS Marriage happens; it can't be planned. When it has to happen, it will happen. Normally, what we ...
RANI MUKERJI I can't stand being late. I try to be professional. I try not to let people down. But people let...
SPIKE MILLIGAN Death can't be so bad if mom went through it. It makes it easier for the child to follow.
DANNY AIELLO I always ask, why can't I be just like Cary Grant or something.
AARON ECKHART I'm very much a believer in the character always heading for something or after something. But t...
MONICA DOLAN I don't want to die in a car accident. When I die it'll be a glorious day. It'll probabl...
RIVER PHOENIX There's war - there's always been war, as long as most of us have been alive. There have alw...
DAVE MATTHEWS Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it ...
NORMAN DAVIES I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working wit...
MANUEL PUIG Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for governmen...
MIKE HUCKABEE I always want to be the best and if I can't, I don't want to run.
EVELYN ASHFORD Never get involved with a business that you can't really be hands-on - that if your employees qu...
FAT JOE You can't be a creative thinker if you're not stimulating your mind, just as you can't b...
KEN ROBINSON I don't feel the depression the people who are always looking back to the '50s, to 'Fath...
BHARATI MUKHERJEE I always knew I was a writer. And I always thought to myself, 'Well, why not me?' Someone ha...
ELIZABETH WURTZEL I'm proud to say that I was that guy playing the character of Dr. Burke on 'Grey's Anato...
ISAIAH WASHINGTON Sports is the common denominator in the world that brings everyone together. If there's any one ...
STEPHEN M. ROSS To make sense to us as physical creatures, any 'truth' must undergo transformations, be couc...
JANE ROBERTS Nothing I did contributed to me having cancer, so I can't sit back and say, 'Oh why me.'...
ERIC DAVIS Why would you be afraid of death? It would be an inconvenience. I have a lot of undone things and it...
DAVID CARRADINE And that's why I chose on purpose not to have a death scene. We've seen them in a million mo...
CHRISTINE LAHTI Medicine really matured me as a person because, as a physician, you're obviously dealing with li...
KEN JEONG Unfortunately, we can never truly know if we're making the right decision. What we do know is th...
YEHUDA BERG If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't...
DONALD MILLER You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS I chose not to put a wig on. The reason why I chose to come out with the cancer thing is because the...
SHARON JONES That's the great paradox of living on this earth, that in the midst of great pain you can have g...
KATHY MATTEA I'd always been interested in maritime history, especially the great liners. I'd have done a...
ERIK LARSON You can't be funny if you don't have good material.
MATT LEBLANC Why can't people just say they were moved? Why do they have to say it's sappy?
CASEY AFFLECK 5-Hour Energy is not an energy drink, it's a focus drink. But we can't say that. The FDA doe...
MANOJ BHARGAVA Comedy always pushes some buttons, because it wouldn't be comedy if it didn't.
BETH BEHRS I've always loved music and held it as a sacred thing that I can't touch, as I don't rea...
AARON KOBLIN
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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P. J. O'ROURKE Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
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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.
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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.
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P. J. O'ROURKE In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is mo...
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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 Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats ...
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.
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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...
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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