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Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Interpretation

What this quote means

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.

Themes

IndividualityChoiceAuthorityAutonomyFreedom

In practice

Example use cases

This quote could be used in a speech about personal freedom and political rights.

More from P. J. O'Rourke

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
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Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
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Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
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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.
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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.
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Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
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