P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.
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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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I'm really tired of virtue.
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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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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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Space has always been confusing to politics.
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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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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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A 'farm' today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall.
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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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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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The Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies is supposed to have subscribed to the Village Voice for six years in an attempt to find out about life in America's rural areas.
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Remember, FDA employees are serious about fear. We pay these people to panic about an iota of rodent hair in our chili, even when the recipe calls for it. FDA employees are first-class agonizers, world champions at losing sleep. When Meryl Streep got hysterical about Alar, they actually checked the apples instead of Meryl's head.
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Never fight an inanimate object.
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I read good. I was an English major.
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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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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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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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Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind, goddamnit!
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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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Any trade that is voluntarily made is mutually beneficial, by definition, and, indeed, is balanced, by definition.
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The Greenpeace booth at all the rock and roll shows nowadays are akin to the old sorcerers who used to stand in the middle of villages warning of danger, 'When night wolf swallows mother moon, there will be great famine.'
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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.