Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards Quotes

“Sucking the fun out of life has always been an important component of politics.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“The Affordable Health Care for Americans Act, passed by the House of Representatives on November 7, 2009, was 1,990 pages long. You could stand on it to paint the ceiling. The entire U.S. Constitution can be printed on eight pages. That's eight pages to run a whole country for 221 years versus four reams of government pig latin if you slam your thumb in a car door.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“The free market is not a creed or an ideology that political conservatives, libertarians, and Ayn Rand acolytes want Americans to take on faith. The free market is simply a measurement. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That’s all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“What's important about morality in politics is us. We own the chicken farm. We must give our bird-brained, feather-headed politicians morals. Politicians love to think of themselves as "free-range" but they do not have the capacity to hunt or gather morals in the wild. If we fail to supply them with morality, politicians begin to act very scary in the barnyard. These are enormous headless chickens and they have nukes.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That’s all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“If there’s something we want, politics shouldn’t be our first resort. Politics is all taking, no making. Whatever politics provides for us will be obtained from other people. Those people won’t love us.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“Politicians show no signs of even knowing the difference between negative and positive rights. Blinded by the dazzle of anything that makes them popular, they honestly may not be able to tell.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“(If it’s any comfort, we should remind ourselves of the purpose of voting. We don’t vote to elect great persons to office. They’re not that great. We vote to throw the bastards out.)”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“Capitalism, so called, is when free people accumulate capital of their own free will for use on freely determined projects. The fact of the matter is that most of these projects flop. Donald Trump, for example. Every property he touches seems to go to hell. “Fat Cat” would be the wrong epithet for Trump. If someone other than paroled former Enron accountants were keeping his books, he’d probably be shown to have a net worth less than that of your twenty-pound tabby who just shredded the drapes. What”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“The free market is the greatest repository of our freedoms. Economic freedom is the freedom we exercise most often and to the greatest extent.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“The best way to have a good political system is to avoid politics. But political disengagement deprives us of opportunities for bitching at politicians and pushing them around. This is occasionally useful and always a pleasure. In our democracy we don’t get in trouble by trying to make politicians mad. We get in trouble by trying to make them like us. Our political system goes to hell when we want it to give us things.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“The American Rebellion,” about our founding fathers. Not till their foes were driven forth By England o’er the main— Not till the Frenchman from the North Had gone with shattered Spain; Not till the clean-swept oceans showed No hostile flag unrolled, Did they remember that they owed To Freedom—and were bold!”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“Zero-sum thinking is a name for envy. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, gives an apt description of the “House of Envy” (as a poet in that most zero-sum of political systems, the Roman empire, might): “Envy within, busy at the meal of snake’s flesh... her tongue dripped venom. Only the sight of suffering could bring a smile to her lips. She never knew the comfort of sleep, but... looked with dismay on men’s good fortune... She could hardly refrain from weeping when she saw no cause for tears.” I didn’t know Hillary Clinton’s involvement in politics dated back to the reign of Augustus. Then”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards

“The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to publish anything about Congress or the president that would bring them into “contempt or disrepute.” In other words, the Sedition Act made it a federal crime to publish anything about Congress or the president. Fortunately”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Don't Vote, it Just Encourages the Bastards