Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
The interesting thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is where the bullet comes out, yet what a big difference it would make in your social schedule.
Interpretation
The quote humorously highlights the stark contrast between the small size of a gun's barrel and the significant impact it has on a person's life.
P. J. O'Rourke’s quote plays on the irony of how a small physical object, like the barrel of a gun, can have such a profound influence on someone's life and relationships. It suggests that the fear and danger associated with firearms can drastically alter one's social interactions and priorities, underscoring the weight of seemingly minor things that can have major consequences.
In practice
In a stand-up comedy routine discussing the absurdity of everyday life.
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.
God will forgive me. It's his job." Heine said this on his deathbed (1856). Hilarious. He must have thought that up years before and counted the seconds to use it.
How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.
There was a time when people said, 'Jim, if you keep on making faces, your face will freeze like that.' Now they just say, 'Pay him!'
Tell the cook of this restaurant with my compliments that these are the very worst sandwiches in the whole world, and that, when I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it.
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
I think one of the basic tasks in life - one of the nice things we can do for each other - is to take things that are horrible and scary and make them acceptable and less frightening and, if possible, funny. It feels great to succeed at that.
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