P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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It's hard to be serious in life.
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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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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.
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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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America is not doctrinaire. It's hard for an American politician to come up with an ideological position that is permanently unforgivable.
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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?
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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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The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.
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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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The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.
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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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The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.
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Traffic was like a bad dog. It wasn't important to look both ways when crossing the street; it was important to not show fear.
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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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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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Space has always been confusing to politics.
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The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.
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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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Imagine having journalists in your own home and not even covering the furniture with plastic sheets first.
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If Christ came back tomorrow, He'd have to change planes in Frankfurt. Modern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.
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A 'farm' today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall.
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Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
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I'm really tired of virtue.
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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.