Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote criticizes how government proposals are often hindered or mismanaged by bureaucracy, leading to negative consequences for the public.
P. J. O'Rourke highlights the disconnect between government intentions and bureaucratic processes. He suggests that while the government may put forth innovative or necessary proposals, the bureaucratic machinery often stifles these ideas, ultimately burdening citizens instead of benefiting them. This commentary reflects a skepticism towards the effectiveness of bureaucratic systems in realizing the goals of governance.
Themes
GovernmentBureaucracyProposalsPublicPolitics
In practice
Example use cases
In a political debate about government inefficiencies.
More from P. J. O'Rourke
All quotes βPredicting 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
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
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
Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, exercises a public trust.
Grover ClevelandRead
Look: I don't want to live with a nuclear Iran. I would like to make it uncomfortable for them to seek it.
Zbigniew BrzezinskiRead
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.
Richard StallmanRead
The Republican Party has become overwhelmingly so extreme that it's hardly a traditional political party anymore.
Noam ChomskyRead
I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny-fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.
Margaret Chase SmithRead
Democrats lead in all the polls by at least ten points, except one.. Fox News. That is with a margin of error of plus or minus the facts.
Stephen ColbertRead