Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Politicians will talk strategy and tactics and policies and programs until they're blue in the face, or you strangle them and they turn blue.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the disconnect between political talk and actionable results, emphasizing the frustration with inaction despite extensive discussion.
P. J. O'Rourke's quote underscores the often frustrating nature of political discourse, where politicians may discuss strategies and policies extensively but fail to deliver tangible outcomes. It suggests that despite the seemingly endless chatter about important issues, the lack of meaningful action leads to apathy and disillusionment, akin to being metaphorically 'strangled' by words without results.
In practice
During a campaign event, a speaker might use this quote to critique the empty promises of politicians.
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.
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
Only 4 sets of people can vote for the PDP: (1) those who are intellectually blind; (2) those who are blinded by ethnicity; (3) those who are blinded by corruption and therefore afraid of the unknown, should power change hands; and finally (4) those who are suffering from a combination of the above terminal sicknesses.
A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'
Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
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