Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the individuality of human beings as opposed to collective behavior in nature.
P. J. O'Rourke's quote suggests that unlike social insects such as ants or bees, humans possess unique reasoning, emotions, and experiences. It highlights the importance of individualism and personal agency, reminding us that our lives are shaped by personal choices and individual relationships rather than a collective existence.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of individual thought in society.
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.
Slavery is ...an atrocious debasement of human nature.
Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.
Time is the brush of God, as he paints his masterpiece on the heart of humanity.
Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?
Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.
I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
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