P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.
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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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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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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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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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Then basically what was happening was that it was the middle '80s, and Rolling Stone realized that a lot of their readers had voted for [Ronald] Reagan, and they were going, "Gosh! We need a Republican! Does anybody know a Republican? Wait a minute! I think P.J.'s a Republican!"
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Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
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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 best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
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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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It's hard to come back from the Balkans and not sound like a Pete Seeger song.
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Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.
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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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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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Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
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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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'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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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 most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.
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A dugout is much superior to a conventional manufactured canoe because you can get soaking wet without bothering to capsize it.
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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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What would be a road hazard anywhere else, in the Third World is probably the road.
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A child growing up in an excessively safe environment may never learn that he is one - not until he gets married and has a wife to tell him so.