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The Chinese Had Gunpowder, But It Didn't Occur To Them To Put It In A Gun. They Possessed The Compass But Didn't Go Anywhere. They Invented Paper, Printing, And A Written Form Of Their Language, But Hardly Anyone In China Was Taught To Read.

-P. J. O'Rourke

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The Chinese Had Gunpowder,

P. J. O'Rourke

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The Chinese Had Gunpowder, But It Didn't Occur To Them To Put It In A Gun. They Possessed The Compass But Didn't Go Anywhere. They Invented Paper, Printing, And A Written Form Of Their Language, But Hardly Anyone In China Was Taught To Read.

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Russian Cars Are Silly. They Look Like Imports Drawn By A Cartoonist For A Uaw Newsletter.

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Guns Are Always The Best Method For A Private Suicide. They Are More Stylish Looking Than Single-edged Razor Blades And Natural Gas Has Got So Expensive. Drugs Are Too Chancy. You Might Miscalculate The Dosage And Just Have A Good Time.

Intelligence Collection Has Been Given An Additional Bureaucracy To Correct The Problems Created By Too Much Bureaucracy In Intelligence Collection.

I Believe That Western Civilization, After Some Disgusting Glitches, Has Become Almost Civilized. I Believe It Is Our First Duty To Protect That Civilization. I Believe It Is Our Second Duty To Improve It. I Believe It Is Our Third Duty To Extend It If We Can.

Because Of Their Cuisine, Germans Don't Consider Farting Rude. They'd Certainly Be Out Of Luck If They Did.

Iraq's Invasion Of Kuwait Is A Case Of Bad Men Doing Wrong Things For Wicked Reasons. This Is The Full-sized Or Standard Purebred Evil And Is Easily Recognized Even By Moral Neophytes. Other Malignities-drugs In America, Famine In Africa And Everything In The Middle East-are More Complex. When Combating Those Evils People Sometimes Have Trouble Deciding Whom To Shoot.

Farm Policy, Although It's Complex, Can Be Explained. What It Can't Be Is Believed. No Cheating Spouse, No Teen With A Wrecked Family Car, No Mayor Of Washington, D.c., Videotaped In Flagrante Delicto Has Ever Come Up With Anything As Farfetched As U.s. Farm Policy.

I Can Understand Why Mankind Hasn't Given Up War. During A War You Get To Drive Tanks Through The Sides Of Buildings And Shoot Foreigners - Two Things That Are Usually Frowned On During Peacetime.

I Can Think Of A Number Of Areas In New York Where Three Acres Of Nuclear Waste Would Make The Neighborhood Safer To Walk Around In Than It Is Now, And Better Lit.

It Is A Popular Delusion That The Government Wastes Vast Amounts Of Money Through Inefficiency And Sloth. Enormous Effort And Elaborate Planning Are Required To Waste This Much Money.

There's A Current Notion That You Should "take Charge Of Your Disease." No Thanks. I'm Busy. I've Got Cancer. I'm Willing To Face Having Cancer. I'm Not Willing To Face Having Cancer With Homework. I Promised Dr. Pipas And Dr. Zaki That I Wouldn't Show Up With Sheaves Of Printouts From The Internet Containing Everything On Wikipedia On Malignancies. They Each Laughed With Detectable Notes Of Relief. Although I Suspect My Wife Has Made Her Way Into The Health Blog Ether. Fish Oil Pills, Raw Kelp, And Other Untoward Substances Started Showing Up On Dinner Plates After I Was Diagnosed.

The Government Is Huge, Stupid, Greedy And Makes Nosy, Officious And Dangerous Intrusions Into The Smallest Corners Of Life - This Much We Can Stand. But The Real Problem Is That Government Is Boring. We Could Cure Or Mitigate The Other Ills Washington Visits On Us If We Could Only Bring Ourselves To Pay Attention To Washington Itself. But We Cannot.

People Love To Be Told What They Know Already. It's Not So Much That What They Say Is Wrong, Though Ann Coulter Does Seem To Be Completely Crazy.

Cars Would Be Safer On Rails!

Any Random Group Of Thirty Vietnamese Women Will Contain A Dozen Who Make Julia Roberts Look Like Lyle Lovett.

There Is Only One Basic Human Right: The Right To Do As You Please, Without Causing Others Harm. With It Comes Our Only Basic Human Duty: The Duty To Accept The Consequences Of Our Actions.

Veal Is A Very Young Beef And, Like A Very Young Girlfriend, It's Cute But Boring And Expensive.

I Didn't See Any Nra Officials Killing Babies In Waco.

If I Do, I Say So. That's The Only Way Out Of That. If There Are Three Words That Need To Be Used More In American Journalism, Commentary, Politics, Personal Life... It's The Magic Words "i Don't Know." I Mean, There Are Certain Basic Principles, Like The Dignity Of The Individual And The Individual's Responsibility, And Certain Basic Economic Principles, Like How When Something Costs Less, More Of It Will Be Consumed... There Are Certain Things That I Feel Pretty Confident About.

The Sky Was So Clear That The Starlight Cast Shadows, And So Many Sparkles And Glitters And Glints Appeared Above Us That It Looked Like Something Really Expensive Had Been Dropped And Shattered In Heaven - God's Steuben Ashtray, Maybe.

Only One Way To Cover A Story Like This, And Make That A Double, Bartender, Please.

Idealism Is Based On Big Ideas. And, As Anybody Who Has Ever Been Asked "what's The Big Idea?" Knows, Most Big Ideas Are Bad Ones.

Last Year, On A Long Car Trip, I Was Listening To Rush Limbaugh Shout. I Usually Agree With Rush Limbaugh; Therefore I Usually Don't Listen To Him. I Listen To Npr: "world To End-poor And Minorities Hardest Hit." I Like To Argue With The Radio.

When Adam Smith Was Being Incomprehensible, He Didn't Have The Luxury Of Brief, Snappy Technical Terms As A Shorthand For Incoherence.

Armenians And Azerbaijanis In Stepanakert, Capital Of The Nagorno-karabakh Autonomous Region, Rioted Over Much Needed Spelling Reform In The Soviet Union.

I Suppose I Should Get A Vcr, But The Only Thing I Like About Television Is Its Ephemerality.

I Started Reading Hunter S. Thompson When I Was In College.

Maybe A Nation That Consumes As Much Booze And Dope As We Do And Has Our Kind Of Divorce Statistics Should Pipe Down About "character Issues."

In Case We Have To Shoot Democrats. It Happened During The Civil War, And It Could Happen Again.

Anyway, No Drug, Not Even Alcohol, Causes The Fundamental Ills Of Society. If We're Looking For The Source Of Our Troubles, We Shouldn't Test People For Drugs, We Should Test Them For Stupidity, Ignorance, Greed And Love Of Power.

Dates Used To Be Made Days Or Even Weeks In Advance. Now Dates Tend To Be Made The Day After. That Is, You Get A Phone Call From Someone Who Says, "if Anyone Asks, I Was Out To Dinner With You Last Night, Okay?"

Moscow Has Changed. I Was Here In 1982, During The Brezhnev Twilight, And Things Are Better Now. For Instance, They've Got Litter. In 1982 There Was Nothing To Litter With.

One Of The Problems With Being A Writer Is That All Of Your Idiocies Are Still In Print Somewhere. I Strongly Support Paper Recycling.

If We Do Our Deficit Spending On Weapons, At Least We Get Weapons. Then If We Need Weapons, We Have Them. If We Don't Need Them, No Harm Is Done.

The Democrats Planned To Fiddle While Rome Burned. The Republicans Were Going To Burn Rome, Then Fiddle.

The Wonder Is That Communism Lasted So Long. But Then Again, Modern Poetry Lasted A Long Time, Too.

There Are Twenty-seven Specific Complaints Against The British Crown Set Forth In The Declaration Of Independence. To Modern Ears They Still Sound Reasonable. They Still Sound Reasonable, In Large Part, Because So Many Of Them Can Be Leveled Against The Federal Government Of The United States.

In The Wake Of Animal House, The Stock Briefly And Quite Wrongly Shot Up. So I Love That Movie.

A Nation With A Goofy Foreign Policy Needs A Very Serious Policy Of Defense.

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