P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-
Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since.
-
Any trade that is voluntarily made is mutually beneficial, by definition, and, indeed, is balanced, by definition.
-
It's hard to be serious in life.
-
I don't watch much television.
-
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.
-
America is not doctrinaire. It's hard for an American politician to come up with an ideological position that is permanently unforgivable.
-
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.
-
The Democrats said, "We don't know what's wrong with America, but we can fix it." The Republicans said, "There's nothing wrong with America, and we can fix that."
-
Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.
-
You may be surprised to discover you're rich, especially if you're broke.
-
The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.
-
Liberals have a quaint and touching faith that truth is on their side and an even quainter faith that journalists are on the side of truth.
-
I figured if I could put together being funny about stuff and actual events, maybe I could do something that wasn't being done much. Because the reporters that I met out there were funny, and they had hilarious stories that just didn't fit in the AP/UPI/New York Times foreign-correspondent style. They couldn't use the things they had. But I could.
-
Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.
-
A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.
-
If the politics of disease are to be understood, particularly in the dreadful countries where this understanding is most needed, then the politics of total collapse have to be understood first.
-
The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.
-
The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.
-
To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage weltschmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?
-
The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.
-
In a society where commonweal does not exist, there are no duties, only exactations to be avoided, and no freedoms, only privileges to be grabbed. There can be no such thing as 'public services' because nothing in the country is truly public. Everything is somebody's fief. And every fief must be exploited if the exploiter cares to survive.
-
The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.
-
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.