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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War is a great asshole magnet.
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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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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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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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You can't get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism.
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Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of progress.
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.
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The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say.
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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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One nice thing about the Third World, you don't have to fasten your seat belt. (Or stop smoking. Or cut down on saturated fats.) It takes a lot off your mind when average life expectancy is forty-five minutes.
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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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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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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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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 observers had a logbook recording the assaults, bombings, and artillery attacks on the area. Each page was ruled in vertical columns: DATE, TIME, LOCATION, DAMAGE, CASUALTIES. The columns headed ACTION TAKEN BY THE UN were completely empty.
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One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere. I strongly support paper recycling.
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The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.
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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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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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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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I have three children and three dogs. You put them in a Prius, you know? People who have a Prius obviously have no life! No wife, no kids, no pets - there's no room in there for anything!