P. J. O'Rourke

Chapter 27: I Endorse Hillary Clinton

Chapter One: The Campaign Begins: Ready, Set, Go to Hell

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.

To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage weltschmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?

These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.

Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.

Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since.

In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters.) And everything that isn't fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe.

The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say.

Pain is the body's way of showing us we're bone-heads. A child growing up in an excessively safe environment may never learn that he is one — not until he gets married and has a wife to tell him so.

Fishing ... is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.

The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts— squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.