P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my family is.
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Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall gin-and-tonic is the way to save the planet.
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New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State's registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they're going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can't understand what they say.
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Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
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Politicians will talk strategy and tactics and policies and programs until they're blue in the face, or you strangle them and they turn blue.
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Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
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Cars let us out of the barn and, while they were at it, destroyed the American nuclear family. As anyone who has had an American nuclear family can tell you, this was a relief to all concerned.
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In the wake of Animal House, all of us at the Lampoon had a lot of Hollywood opportunities. We could definitely get people to return phone calls.
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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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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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Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude.
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Because of their cuisine, Germans don't consider farting rude. They'd certainly be out of luck if they did.
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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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War is a great asshole magnet.
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Even Jimmy Carter can't be wrong all the time.
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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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Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.
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Liberals want to live downtown. All over America - in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown - there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.
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People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it's the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.
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In a society where commonweal does not exist, there are no duties, only exactations to be avoided, and no freedoms, only privileges to be grabbed. There can be no such thing as 'public services' because nothing in the country is truly public. Everything is somebody's fief. And every fief must be exploited if the exploiter cares to survive.
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The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say.
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Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.
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There's only one secret to bachelor cooking - not caring how it tastes.
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Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.