P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Russian cars are silly. They look like imports drawn by a cartoonist for a UAW newsletter.

There was also a hunger strike in front of the National Press Club, which seemed an odd place to have a hunger strike (a cocktail fast, maybe). Although the Bangladeshis were savvy enough to know to know that if you're going to pester journalists, don't go to where they work: You'll never find them there.

Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples.

Mercedes Benz : A mechanical device that increases sexual arousal in women.

Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty.

There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable ... in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.

The words 'Space Age' have a quaint, nostalgic tone - sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching 'The Jetsons.'

When a couple decides to divorce, they should inform both sets of parents before having a party and telling all their friends. This is not only courteous but practical. Parents may be very willing to pitch in with comments, criticism, and malicious gossip of their own to help the divorce along.

One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you're not in the Army.

Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.

The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.

The bar is set pretty low if you want to be a hip, accessible conservative.

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.

Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.

Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.

When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.

The Theory of Surplus Value means that anytime you hire someone, you are exploiting him. If you pay someone to fix your automobile, he has the right, by virtue of being your mechanic, to steal your car.

All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.

Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.

Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.

The Arab peoples possess an ancient and highly developed civilization that is in many ways more sophisticated than our own. For instance, they invented algebra. And this is why we have to go to war with Saddam Hussein this minute and bomb the shish kebab out of him before he invents trig and chemistry and the whole of America flunks high school.

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

After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States.

Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace.

If I give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods, I can add ten years to my life. Trouble is, I'll add it to the wrong end.

Smoking crack is a way for people who couldn't afford college to study the works of Charles Darwin.

There's a lot of debate on this subject - about what kind of car handles best. Some say a a front-engined car, some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind.

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?

The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.

Disney's House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war.

Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He's a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he's such an excellent banjo player that you almost don't wish you had a pair of wire cutters.

Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.

The Three Branches of Government: Money, Television, and Bullshit

The 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.

I'm a political conservative.

Government usually doesn't work. It doesn't work because it is political. People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs. The difference between the political process and an honest life is the difference between parading around waving picket signs while hollering catcalls in front of the White House and getting up in the morning to go make a living.

I knew Hunter Thompson since the '70s, and I loved him, but he would wear me out as I got older.

One of these suburbs is actually named Stalingrad, which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793.

We'll run this planet as we please, and if you don't like it, go back where we came from.

Zen martini: A martini with no vermouth at all. And no gin, either.

Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.

Whenever people tell you they are going to wipe the slate clean, it's your slate they mean to wipe.

The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.

The Italians have had 2,000 years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place!

Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it's number 1,000,000,001.

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in.

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

The minute somebody joins a committee ... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.

Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.

Like it or not, I've come to appreciate soccer. Any kid can play, which fits with the inclusive agenda of progressive schools. Although the corollary to 'any kid can play' is that every kid must play because there is an iron grip to the warm hug of progressive inclusionism.

There are no kinder or better people in the world than those who listen to you when you are 18.

Sometimes you need a B-2 bomber and sometimes you need your mother.

As a libertarian I believe we should have a federal government simple and circumscribed enough to be run by an average, dull, normal American. With George W. Bush we have half the equation in place.

In the American political system, you're only allowed to have real ideas if it's absolutely guaranteed that you can't win an election

We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.

Thanksgiving is so called because we are all so thankful that it only comes once a year.

The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind.

Liberals want to live downtown. All over America - in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown - there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.

When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.

The preamble to the Constitution states: "We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare ... " It doesn't say "guarantee the general welfare." And it certainly doesn't say "give welfare benefits to all the people in the country who aren't doing so well even if the reason they aren't doing so well is because they're sitting on their butts in front of the TV".

It's the squares who know how to fly the fighter planes and operate the missiles and the bombs and work the M-16s. Liberals would still be fumbling with the federally mandated trigger locks.

What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.

Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.

When someone detonates a suicide bomb, that person does not have career prospects.

W if for Women. They're awful, mendacious,
Nasty and selfish, cruel and salacious,
As thievish as gypsies, more crazy than Celts
Be sure that you never fuck anything else

Even a band of angels can turn ugly and start looting if enough angels are unemployed and hanging around the Pearly Gates convinced that all the succubi own all the liquor stores in Heaven.

Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.

In midlife, we're as dumb as we get.

The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.

Modern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.

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.

Where self-interest is suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control that dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity.

If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.

Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs.

What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians - whatever those motives may be - is that politicians must announce their motives as visionary and grand.

Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.

I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I'm not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.

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.

I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.

There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency, and scoreless sports ties are boring.

Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.

Nothing bad is going to happen to us. If we get fired, it's not failure; its a midlife vocational reassessment.

One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them.

What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt.

Rich white Protestant men have held on to some measure of power in America almost solely by getting women, blacks, and other disadvantaged groups to wear crippling foot fashions. This keeps them too busy with corns and bunions to compete in the job market.

When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.

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!

The purpose of sports - even foreign sports - is not to bore people.

New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State's registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they're going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can't understand what they say.

A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too.

The web is just a device by which bad ideas travel around the globe at the speed of light.

There are selves too big for one person to contain. You cannot call them selfish. There is nothing -ish about such selves. They are the self, as it were, itself.

Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.

I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.

Government conspiracy? They can't even deliver our mail and it's got our address on it and everything!

A cocktail party is what you call it when you invite everyone you know to come over to your house at six p.m., put cigarettes out on your rug, and leave at eight to go somewhere more interesting for dinner without inviting you.

As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.

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