P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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I think the Baby Boom does have a tendency to get its nose in everything. The Greatest Generation had a better tendency to leave people alone. Of course, they also had a better tendency to hate everybody's guts.
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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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A firm, hearty handshake gives a good first impression, and you'll never be forgiven if you don't live up to it.
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Inside every Sancho Panza there's a Don Quixote struggling to get out.
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In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'
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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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Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca's day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real-estate developments.
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The subculture of felons is in great vogue among adolescents. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so forth allow us Republicans to say to America's young people, 'We be thugs.' The GOP may capture the youth vote at last.
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Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.
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Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.
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I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
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Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
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The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.
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Toledo is better than exciting, it's happy. Because nothing is more conducive to unhappiness than taking yourself seriously, and taking yourself seriously is difficult when you're baseball team is the Mud Hens.
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The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.
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I don't think anybody's really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory.
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Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.
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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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Satire doesn't effect change.
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Northwest Ohio is flat. There isn't much up. The land is so flat that a child from Toledo is under the impression that the direction hills go is down. Sledding is done down from street level into creek beds and road cuts.
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Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.
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Regulation creates a moral hazard.
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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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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.