Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
Interpretation
This quote critiques authoritarianism and emphasizes the importance of individual choice over imposed ideas of goodness.
P. J. O'Rourke's famous quote suggests that self-appointed leaders who claim to know what is best for others undermine personal autonomy and trust in the individual's right to make their own choices. The term 'swine' paints a vivid picture of such a person as foolish and arrogant, highlighting the absurdity of believing that one can impose their own vision of goodness on others.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about personal freedom and political rights.
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
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.
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.
βTo think the way you do,β he said smiling, βyou have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.β βOn both, perhaps.β
It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence - but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture.
Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.
It's been interesting to see how similar audiences in the East and West are, actually, and how it makes you realize that when politicians emphasize the differences between our cultures, it's usually because it benefits them more so than us.
In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling - should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men.
Money is really worth no more than as it can be used to accomplish the Lord's work. Life is worth as much as it is spent for the Lord's service.
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