P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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'Malthus,', says Vice President Al Gore in Earth in the Balance, 'was right in predicting that the population would grow geometrically.' Al, as the father of four children, should know.
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I'm not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling.
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Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations.
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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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You may be surprised to discover you're rich, especially if you're broke.
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A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?'
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What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt.
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Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner's Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while 'Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm' by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.
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America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being 'hegemonistic', of engaging in 'unilateralism', of behaving as if we're the only nation on earth that counts. We are.
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Weird clothing is de rigeur for teenagers, but today's generation of teens is finding it difficult to be sufficiently weird. This is because the previous generation of teens, who went through adolescence in the sixties and seventies, used up practically all the available weirdness.
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Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.
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A friend of mine at the American Enterprise Institute says there are two parties: the silly party and the stupid party. I'm too old for the silly party, so I had to join the stupid party.
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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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The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German. For this, and several other reasons, Germany is known as 'the land where Israelis learned their manners'.
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There's only one secret to bachelor cooking - not caring how it tastes.
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These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.
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The idea of a world where all people are alike - in wealth or in anything else - is a fantasy for the stupid.
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Even Jimmy Carter can't be wrong all the time.
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Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
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Masochists are people that have pleasure confused with pain. In a world that has television confused with entertainment, doritoes confused with food, and Dan Quayle confused with a national political leader, masochists are clearly less mixed-up than the rest of us.
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Saigon is like all the other great modern cities of the world. It's the mess left from people getting rich.
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I was told to hand over my disposable lighter, to prevent, I suppose, any threat of "Do what I say or I'll light this Marlboro and you'll all die - in thirty years due to inhalation of secondhand smoke."
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Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.
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Of all the American educational system's problems, none is more severe than the academic year beginning before Labor Day.