P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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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.
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The great thing about starting golf in your forties is that you can start golf in your forties. You can start other things in your forties but generally your wife makes you stop them, as Bill Clinton found out.
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My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow... he wasn't evil or anything, but he was worthless.
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You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; if you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.
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When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.
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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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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 collegiate idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.
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I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.
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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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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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The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?
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Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked 'What's the big idea?' knows, most big ideas are bad ones.
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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.
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I myself am a parent in a small business. Number of employees: one.
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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 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.
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Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.
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'You're stupid,' is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.
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To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.
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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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If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.
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War expands government powers. The trouble is that, when the war goes away, the government powers do not.