P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Saigon is like all the other great modern cities of the world. It's the mess left from people getting rich.
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Political stuff is all about his [Hunter S. Thompson] reaction to a situation. And my stuff is much more externally driven.
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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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America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being 'hegemonistic', of engaging in 'unilateralism', of behaving as if we're the only nation on earth that counts. We are.
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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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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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The American political system is like fast food - mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things and everybody wants some.
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Feminism is the result of a few ignorant and literal-minded women letting the cat out of the bag about which is the superior sex. Once women made it public that they could do things better than men, they were, of course, forced to do them.
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A steady job is at least as deleterious to the spirit of bachelorhood as a steady date. Some jobs are worse than actual wives.
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What would be a road hazard anywhere else, in the Third World is probably the road.
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One of the reporters must have flunked journalism school because he asked a question that went straight to the point.
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Happy hour is slightly different in the Soviet Union. There are no ice cubes or orange-peel twists in the vodka. Also, it lasts all day.
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There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.
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The most extraordinary change in Moscow was Arbat Street, the USSR's first pedestrian mall. Of course, there's something a little sad about a pedestrian mall in a nation where few people own cars- the whole damn country's a pedestrian mall.
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Of all the American educational system's problems, none is more severe than the academic year beginning before Labor Day.
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Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.
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In the American political system, you're only allowed to have real ideas if it's absolutely guaranteed that you can't win an election
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The poor of the world cannot be made rich by the redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape.
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In the past a man was expected to give his seat on a bus to a woman. Today it would be much more courteous for that man to give her his job.
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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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On Friday, June 12, 1992, 110 heads of state gathered at Riocentro. They were indistinguishable in dress and deportment. Where was biodiversity when we needed it?
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President Bush said that if illegal immigrants want citizenship, they'd have to do three things: pay taxes, hold meaningful jobs, and learn English. Bush doesn't meet those qualifications.
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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 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."