P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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There's only one secret to bachelor cooking - not caring how it tastes.
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There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.
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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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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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Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.
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A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?'
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I suspect the Haitian Ministry of Health's principal contribution to health in Haiti is providing nice, healthy jobs to those Haitians with the connection to get them.
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Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.
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Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.
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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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Freedom is for fun.
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Nothing about economic growth in the United States over the course of the past 40, 50 years, during which time this has been continually happening, would indicate that we are being harmed in an overall sense by this.
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Humans have trouble with economics, as you may have noticed, and not just because economic circumstances sometimes cause them to starve. Humans seem to have an innate inability to pay attention to economic principles.
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Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.
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There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is - certainly is one of them. But it's low on my list.
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The typical old-fashioned diet was so bad it almost resembled modern dieting.
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A good bachelor drinks his dessert (and sometimes the rest of his meals). A sweet tooth is a danger signal that you're getting too much exercise and not enough cocktails.
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Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my family is.
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In 1970 or '71, early in the magazine, Michael O'Donoghue did maybe eight pages of a 1958 yearbook, from Ezra Taft Benson High School. But by the time the [book-length] high-school yearbook came around, he didn't want to be involved.
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There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.
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I was never in the office [of Rolling Stone]. It was very different from Lampoon, where we spent a lot of time together socially, which is to say "drunk."
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Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
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I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck.
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When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... This violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.