Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Interpretation
Choose your reading material wisely, as it reflects on you even in lifeβs unexpected moments.
This quote humorously suggests that we should always choose to read something that enhances our reputation, even in unforeseen circumstances such as death. It highlights the value we place on appearances and how our interests and choices, even in private moments like reading, can define us and what we wish to convey to others about ourselves.
In practice
Inspiring students at a literary event to appreciate the importance of their reading choices.
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
I think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people.
All I have learned, I learned from books.
I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.
When I teach writing, I have a mantra: 'Be a first-rate version of yourself, and not a second-rate version of another writer.'
Christian mothers, if only you knew the future of distress and peril, of shame ill-restrained, that you prepare for your sons and daughters in imprudently accustoming them to live hardly clothed and in making them lose the sense of modesty, you should be ashamed of yourselves and of the harm done the little ones whom heaven entrusted to your care, to be reared in Christian dignity and culture.
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