P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that's the point.
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My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.
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Pollution is a problem, and there's the whole problem of the spoiling of the commons, but we've addressed the pollution problem on a variety of different levels in a variety of ways, and it's worked pretty well.
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This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans.
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Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you're handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it's over.
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That happy sense of purpose people have when standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet.
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Freddie Aguilar, who's billed as 'the Bob Dylan of the Philippines.' This is unfair, since he's good-looking, plays the guitar well, can carry a tune, and writes songs that make sense.
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Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.
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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.
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No government proposal more complicated than 'This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private' ever works.
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Any terrorism is an attack on libertarian values.
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Bill Maher can be pretty good, except when he gets "important." Maher's all over the place politically.
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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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Democrats hate success.
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Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.
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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.
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The First Amendment only says 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' It can disrespect all it wants.
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Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.
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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.
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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.