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" You're not a baby boomer if you don't have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate. "

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" When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school. "

P. J. O'Rourke

Sports

School

City

" Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering. "

" We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter. "

" Hubris is one of the great renewable resources. "

" The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it. "

" I live in rural New Hampshire, and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we're short on people. My town has a population of 301. "

" Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do. "

" The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats. "

" Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself. "

" Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human. "

" The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt. "

" One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them. "

" Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. "

" Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid. "

" There's one more terrifying fact about old people: I'm going to be one soon. "

P. J. O'Rourke

Old

People

" A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitches. It's as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the 'Iliad' while playing a lyre. "

P. J. O'Rourke

Kindle

Electronic

" The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that's the point. "

" The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind. "

" We've come into the world of '1984,' but it turns out to be '1984'-Lite. "

" To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal. "

" I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I've got beachfront property. You tell us up there, 'By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,' and we say, 'Your point is?' "

" The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it. "

" In a free country, government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. "

" There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. "

" Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there. "

" Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician. "

" In midlife, we're as dumb as we get. "

P. J. O'Rourke

Get

Dumb

" Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed. "

" I don't think anybody's really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory. "

" I'm too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom's earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works. "

P. J. O'Rourke

Tongue

Tough