Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the poor quality of television programming and its negative effects on viewers' intellect.
P. J. O'Rourke highlights the detrimental impact of low-quality television on viewers' cognitive abilities. He suggests that while network television has tried to attract audiences with simplistic and unengaging content, this often leads to a lack of intellectual stimulation and, metaphorically, a state where viewers' minds become 'bankrupt,' indicating a loss of critical thinking and engagement.
Themes
TelevisionProgrammingIntellectCritiqueLosingBrain
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about media literacy, this quote could emphasize the importance of choosing quality content.
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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.
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