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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Despite the fact that meat is made from dead animals, it shouldn't smell that way. Try this test for meat freshness: close your eyes and see if you can tell the pork chops from a gym locker.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Affirmative action makes employers think, 'Black woman nuclear physicist? Hah! Probably let her into Harvard 'cause they were looking for a twofer. Bet she got C's in high school practical math. Give her a job in personnel.'
P. J. O'Rourke
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The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborghini to the Grand Prix track to watch the charter buses race.
P. J. O'Rourke
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The words 'Space Age' have a quaint, nostalgic tone - sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching 'The Jetsons.'
P. J. O'Rourke
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Kids are disorganized.
P. J. O'Rourke
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A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
P. J. O'Rourke
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In midlife, we're as dumb as we get.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.
P. J. O'Rourke
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I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with their constituents. The electorate now has instant information about what politicians have been up to.
P. J. O'Rourke
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I think Michael O'Donoghue felt he'd said what he wanted to say. In fact, nobody thought we could spin it out long enough to make a book.
P. J. O'Rourke
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I'm too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom's earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
