Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
Interpretation
This quote criticizes how government proposals are often hindered or mismanaged by bureaucracy, leading to negative consequences for the public.
P. J. O'Rourke highlights the disconnect between government intentions and bureaucratic processes. He suggests that while the government may put forth innovative or necessary proposals, the bureaucratic machinery often stifles these ideas, ultimately burdening citizens instead of benefiting them. This commentary reflects a skepticism towards the effectiveness of bureaucratic systems in realizing the goals of governance.
In practice
In a political debate about government inefficiencies.
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.
Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.
No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
And as a matter of fact, governments don't act, governments only react. The bankers make the decisions, and then governments decide how are we going to adjust to this. Government can't do anything unless the bank gives them the money to do it.
The history of political movements in the African diaspora is that the solution to the problem is never in the hands of people who are advancing the movement. I try and operate on my own terms.
It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.
The happiness of society is the end of government.
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