Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the idea that citizens often have a role in perpetuating ineffective governance, particularly in a democracy.
P. J. O'Rourke's quote suggests that every government is made up of individuals who may be motivated by self-interest rather than the common good. In a democratic system, this self-interest extends to the populace, implying that the electorate, through their choices and actions, shares the responsibility for their government's shortcomings.
Themes
GovernmentDemocracyResponsibilityPoliticsCitizenship
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a political debate to emphasize the responsibility of voters.
More from P. J. O'Rourke
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Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
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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.
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Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
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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
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