P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of progress.
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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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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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There's no telling what might have happened to our defense budget if Saddam Hussein hadn't invaded Kuwait that August and set everyone gearing up for World War II. Can we count on Saddam Hussein to come along every year and resolve our defense-policy debates? Given the history of the Middle East, it's possible.
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The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
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Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.
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A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty - their power and privilege - to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians
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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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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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There's only one secret to bachelor cooking - not caring how it tastes.
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Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.
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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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'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 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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I'm not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling.
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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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Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my family is.
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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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The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.
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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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Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.
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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.
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Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
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Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.