Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
Interpretation
Cars shifted from being objects of love and passion to mere necessities over time.
P. J. O'Rourke's quote reflects on the transformation of cars from symbols of freedom and enjoyment to mundane tools required for everyday life, largely due to urban development. The transition symbolizes a broader trend where the joy of many things gets replaced by practical necessity as society evolves.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about the evolution of transportation in urban design.
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.
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.
Mobile phones are misnamed. They should be called gateways to human knowledge.
We went to Ladakh ... and we asked this woman, 'What was the benefit you had from solar electricity?' And she thought for a minute and said, 'It's the first time I can see my husband's face in winter.'
It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.
I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.
Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs. And we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who were formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base.
The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn't even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we'd never have had the light bulb.
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