02c. 1984 ADCalifornians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won't dig up the pretty lawn, won't plant anything for fear of getting dirty, and they use fragrant bath salts from The Body Shop instead of smelly compost.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
03c. 1984 ADTom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
04c. 1984 ADWhen you pay a hospital bill, you're really paying two hospital bills - one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital. and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
05c. 1984 ADMedical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
06c. 1984 ADSheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca's day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real-estate developments.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
07c. 1984 ADIf you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
08c. 1984 ADGovernment is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
09c. 1984 ADNobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
10c. 1984 ADNo Americans wants to see somebody lose their house because of health bills. Their boat? Maybe. Maybe the boat. But not the house.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
11c. 1984 ADThe car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and health and retirement benefits working on the General Livestock Corporation assembly line putting udders on cows.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
12c. 1984 ADPositive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
13c. 1984 ADHealth care's not about insurance! Health care's about getting treatment.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
14c. 1984 ADNancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
16c. 1984 ADAgriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
17c. 1984 ADExplosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
18c. 1984 ADAll religions must be made child-proof. Our teachers' unions have done good work in this field, K through 12. Delaying first communions and bar mitzvahs until age 21 would be another positive step.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
19c. 1984 ADThe great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
20c. 1984 ADThere is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
24c. 1984 ADBeing a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.P.J. O'Rourke / quote ↗
