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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
CarsUrban SprawlNecessityTransformationPleasure
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a discussion about the evolution of transportation in urban design.
More from P. J. O'Rourke
All quotes βAlways read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
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.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
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.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Similar quotes
We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.
William O. DouglasRead
I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations.
Stephen ColbertRead
Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.
C. L. R. JamesRead
Our values are that we do think that people have a right to privacy. And that our customers are not our products.
Tim CookRead
Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.
Clayton ChristensenRead
To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.
Steve JobsRead