P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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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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You can keep the dining room clean by eating in the kitchen.
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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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I've only been to New Zealand once, about 1989. It was incredibly beautiful, kind of like the ideal of where I live in New England - all that and then some - but I can't say I was there long enough to get any very clear idea.
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Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help?
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It's hard to be serious in life.
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It's better to make fun of yourself because you've always got someone around to make fun of, and they can't sue you.
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There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It's going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it's the Democrats.
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Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do.
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Being gloomy is easier than being cheerful. Anybody can say 'I've got cancer' and get a rise out of a crowd. But how many of us can do five minutes of good stand-up comedy?
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The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
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Moviemakers are rewarded with tax write-offs if, when seeking a location that looks like America, they seek it in America.
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The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.
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Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
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Who, other than a crazy person, does anything besides hang up on a robo-call? Any call, any person, anywhere, under any circumstances.
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Simply because something is a populist movement doesn't make it either good or bad.
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Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.
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The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they've shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative.
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Detroit is beautiful - though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it.
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Marijuana is … self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?
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They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, 'But doesn't it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn't it be set in New Guinea?' And you say, 'But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.'