P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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As murderous industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald's.
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The great apologist has to have lived large and wild. If he's going to kiss the world's boo-boos and make up, he'd better plant some bruises first. A master apologizer has to be a Lord Byron, a Rick in Casablanca, a Lee Atwater, anyway.
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Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
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America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness - divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.
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We had a choice between Democrats who couldn't learn from the past and Republicans who couldn't stop living in it.
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I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.
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Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.
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Never wear anything that panics the cat.
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The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
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Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
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You're not a baby boomer if you don't have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate.
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It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.
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Taxi drivers all over the world, by the way, are under Newspaper Guild contract to give easy quotes to foreign correspondents.
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In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's different.'
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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
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Greatest generation came through some stuff that we can't even imagine - the Depression, World War I - and all they wanted after that was a breather and a calm and a quiet life, and they get us.
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I have no idea if some societies, anthropologically speaking, aren't really suited for democracy. I don't think that's true.
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Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.
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Disney's Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative.
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Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.
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Actually, there is no way of making vomiting courteous. You have to do the next best thing, which is to vomit in such a way that the story you tell about it later will be amusing.
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TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.
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The problem isn't a Congress that won't cut spending or a president who won't raise taxes. The problem is an American public with a bottomless sense of entitlement to federal money.
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I am a student of stupidity. I am a political reporter.