Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the contrasting views of government between the two major political parties in the U.S.
P.J. O'Rourke humorously highlights the differing philosophies of the Democratic and Republican parties regarding the role of government in improving citizens' lives. He suggests that Democrats advocate for government as a solution to problems and improvement of individual lives, while Republicans express skepticism towards government effectiveness but still take control and demonstrate its failures.
In practice
In a political debate to illustrate the differences between party platforms.
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.
Of course, there is no question that Libya - and the world - will be better off with Gaddafi out of power. I, along with many other world leaders, have embraced that goal, and will actively pursue it through non-military means. But broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.
Government ought to be all outside and no inside. . . . Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.
The era when the United States was the dominant global power is steadily coming to an end, and it must find a way of acknowledging this and framing its ambitions and interests accordingly. Instead of claiming the right to continuing primacy in east Asia, for example, it should seek to share that primacy with China.
It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.
I can't admit to myself that the creation of a Palestinian state won't happen. What I know is that with each passing year it gets more and more difficult to happen, not least because there is more and more bloodshed, generation upon generation.
Americans are struck by lightning with greater frequency than they commit voter impersonation fraud, and that's the only kind of fraud that photo ID requirements could have any hope of preventing.
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