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People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.

— P. J. O'Rourke All the Trouble in the World (1994)

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Politics

More quotes by P. J. O'Rourke

She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.

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.

The Liberty Manifesto (1993)

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Parliament of Whores (1991)

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

Parliament of Whores (1991)

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Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Albert Einstein

Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Mao Zedong

Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state.

Benito Mussolini

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

Theodor Adorno The Authoritarian Personality (1950)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: P. J. O'Rourke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.