P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
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There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.
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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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The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.
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What use is it to endure the Dutch Rubs and Indian Rope Burns that are politics if you can't obtain mastery over people and give them noogies back?
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Space has always been confusing to politics.
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Imagine having journalists in your own home and not even covering the furniture with plastic sheets first.
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Call a man 'ignorant,' and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.
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Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
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Some people say a front-engine car handles best. Some people say a rear-engine car handles best. I say a rented car handles best.
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By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.
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Fishing ... is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.
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As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.
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The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society's ills can be cured politically. It's like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried.
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I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper.
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One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them.
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War expands government powers. The trouble is that, when the war goes away, the government powers do not.
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I myself am a parent in a small business. Number of employees: one.
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Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.
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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.
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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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Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
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The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.
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Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.