P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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.
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In a free country, government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference.
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Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, because they don't read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.'
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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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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.
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When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.
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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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I'm fascinated by political enthusiasm.
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Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.
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As a former writer for the 'National Lampoon,' I've probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.
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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.
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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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Inside every Sancho Panza there's a Don Quixote struggling to get out.
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Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.
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Jeans fit the mature male one of two ways, both dirigible in nature. You make a public impression that's either Hindenburg or Goodyear blimp.
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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.
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Everybody with a gun has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, you'd be crazy not to have a gun. Though, I assure you, all the crazy people have guns, too.
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The District of Columbia is an extreme example of disconnect between financial input and educational outcome. Unfortunately, extreme is not the same as abnormal.
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Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty- their power and privilege- to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians.
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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.
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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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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.
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If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words 'I don't know.'
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As a longtime former resident of 15 years in Washington, I wish that everybody would stay off the Mall with their political cause so that we can get out there, you know, and play flag football or Frisbee, or walk the dog or something - you know, which is, you know, what the National Mall should be for, in my personal opinion.