Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote critiques authoritarianism and emphasizes the importance of individual choice over imposed ideas of goodness.
P. J. O'Rourke's famous quote suggests that self-appointed leaders who claim to know what is best for others undermine personal autonomy and trust in the individual's right to make their own choices. The term 'swine' paints a vivid picture of such a person as foolish and arrogant, highlighting the absurdity of believing that one can impose their own vision of goodness on others.
Themes
IndividualityChoiceAuthorityAutonomyFreedom
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a speech about personal freedom and political rights.
More from P. J. O'Rourke
All quotes βAlways read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
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.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
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.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Similar quotes
We have used the Bible as if it was a mere special constable's handbook β an opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded β a mere book to keep the poor in order.
Charles KingsleyRead
Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.
Carl JungRead
Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left? We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance. The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life.
Jacob NeedlemanRead
The more humble, needy, and subdued you are before Allah, the closer you will be to Him.
Ibn TaymiyyahRead
I think a person has to believe in something,_x000D_ or search out some kind of faith;_x000D_ otherwise life is empty, nothing._x000D_ How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,_x000D_ why children are born, why there are stars in the sky..._x000D_ Either you know why you live,_x000D_ or it's all small, unnecessary bits.
Sarah RuhlRead
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
Francis BaconRead