Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.
Interpretation
This quote humorously suggests that people are more honest in casual settings like bars than in formal situations.
P. J. O'Rourke highlights the idea that informal environments, such as bars, can foster greater honesty in conversations. In contrast to more structured settings like briefings or books, where information might be filtered or less genuine, a bar's relaxed atmosphere encourages people to express themselves more openly, even if it's still a blend of truth and embellishment.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a discussion about how environments affect communication during a social event.
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.
I was the captain of the latent paranoid softball team. We used to play all the neurotics on sunday morning. Nailbiters against the bedwetters, and if you've never seen neurotics play softball, it's really funny. I used to steal second base, and feel guilty and go back.
'The difficulty with this conversation,' said Arthur after a sort of pondering look had crawled slowly across his face like a mountaineer negotiating a tricky outcrop, 'is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.'
Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice”?
I don't know how to tell a joke. I never tell jokes. I can tell stories that happened to me... anecdotes. But never a joke.
The naive was only a part of my fairy tales; humour was the real salt in them.
"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind."
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.