P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
-
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.
-
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.
-
No government proposal more complicated than 'This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private' ever works.
-
Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.
-
My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.
-
I'm fascinated by political enthusiasm.
-
Liberals consider people to be nuisances.
-
We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.
-
I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.
-
Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.
-
When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.
-
You can't destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America's elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you're doing us a favor.
-
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.
-
The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.
-
The most futuristic aspect of the House of the Future was that it was made almost entirely of plastic.
-
Everything on a boat has a different name than it would have if it weren't on a boat. Either this is ancient seafaring tradition or it's how people who mess around with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished college.
-
Bill Maher can be pretty good, except when he gets "important." Maher's all over the place politically.
-
It was to be a short visit for the G-shevs. More than four days in the U.S. and Raisa's VISA card bill would shatter the fragile Soviet economy.
-
For decades in America, there has been an effort to ensure that the rights of those who are not sane are the same as the rights of those who are.
-
The people who despise America are the editors of the 'New Statesman.' Their green-card applications must have been turned down.
-
The purpose of sports - even foreign sports - is not to bore people.
-
Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.
-
The First Amendment only says 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' It can disrespect all it wants.