Robert lowry

“When you ask people if they would rather earn $70,000 in 1900 or $70,000 now, a significant number choose 1900. True, the average yearly income in 1900 was about $450. So we’d be doing phenomenally well compared to our peers from 1900. But no amount of money in 1900 could buy Novocain or antibiotics or a refrigerator or air-conditioning or a powerful computer we could hold in one hand. About the only thing $70,000 bought in 1900 that it couldn’t buy today was the opportunity to soar above most everyone else. We’d rather lap the field in 1900 with an average life expectancy of only forty-seven years than sit in the middle of the pack now with an average life expectancy of over seventy-six years (and a computer in our palm). A”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Us yokels who majored in beer and getting the skirts off Tri-Delts bear no responsibility for Thoreau’s hippie jive or John Kenneth Galbraith’s nitwit economics or Henry Kissinger’s brown-nosing the Shah of Iran. None of us served as models for characters in that greasy Love Story book. Our best and brightest stick to running insurance agencies and don’t go around cozening the nation into Vietnam wars. It wasn’t my school that laid the educational groundwork for FDR’s demagoguery or JFK’s Bay of Pigs slough-off or even Teddy Roosevelt’s fool decision to split the Republican Party and let that buttinski Wilson get elected. You can’t pin the rap on us.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This?"

“You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This?"

“They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it. —Nelba Blandón, Interior Ministry Director of Censorship, quoted in The New York Times, 1984”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This?"