P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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I think it's always easy to be sympathetic to parts of the government in detail; in their concrete manifestations. Because obviously, we don't have government for no reason.
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Lampoon was a very collegial operation, though "collegial" usually means "friendly" and it wasn't that friendly. But we were tight, like a family.
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Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.
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Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
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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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I arrived in the middle of a press conference - as boring a thing to sit through if you don't know the language as it is if you do.
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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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America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness - divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.
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People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.
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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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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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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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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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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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Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
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We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.
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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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I am a student of stupidity. I am a political reporter.
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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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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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Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn't matter.
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The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.