P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box.
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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.
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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?"
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Harvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage industry.
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The laws of the marketplace are physical laws, and they don't become suspended in a crisis any more than the law of gravity does.
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Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the liberal elite. And we can't blame taxpayers for being reluctant to subsidize the reportorial careers of J-school twerps who should have joined the Peace Corps and gone to Africa to 'speak truth to power' to Robert Mugabe.
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Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.
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One thing talk can't accomplish is communication. This is because everybody's talking too much to pay attention to what anyone is saying
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A careful reading of 50 Simple Things leaves you wondering whether you're going to die from environmental disaster or intellectual annoyance. Failing either, you can worry yourself to death.
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The people who despise America are the editors of the 'New Statesman.' Their green-card applications must have been turned down.
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Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.
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America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God.
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The two most frightening words in Washington are 'bipartisan consensus.' Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.
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I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.
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All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.
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Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician.
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I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I've got beachfront property. You tell us up there, 'By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,' and we say, 'Your point is?'
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Jimmy Carter was - he still - he remains to this day America's most ex of ex-presidents. You just can't believe that we elected this doofus. He was a bright enough guy and sort of well-meaning. But he was about as prepared to be president of the United States as your goofy old uncle, you know, the one that memorises baseball statistics.
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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.
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America is a meritocracy.
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The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.
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The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer's cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.
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Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.
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Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.