P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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I'm really tired of virtue.
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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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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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Regulation creates a moral hazard.
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Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
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Any trade that is voluntarily made is mutually beneficial, by definition, and, indeed, is balanced, by definition.
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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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I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.
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The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry - knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission.
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A person has got to balance work and life and family in order to be a balanced person.
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Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware.
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Space has always been confusing to politics.
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Simply because something is a populist movement doesn't make it either good or bad.
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Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.
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There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with raw egg yolks and cottage cheese in them.
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Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives.
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Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
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A pleasant natural environment is a good- a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.
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America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
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Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And - since women are a majority of the population - we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.
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Because of their cuisine, Germans don't consider farting rude. They'd certainly be out of luck if they did.
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On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all.
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Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.
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Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.