P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
-
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.
-
There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
-
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.
-
America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness - divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.
-
Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.
-
In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's different.'
-
Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
-
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.
-
We had a choice between Democrats who couldn't learn from the past and Republicans who couldn't stop living in it.
-
Disney's Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative.
-
We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.
-
I am a student of stupidity. I am a political reporter.
-
I have no idea if some societies, anthropologically speaking, aren't really suited for democracy. I don't think that's true.
-
Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.
-
Taxi drivers all over the world, by the way, are under Newspaper Guild contract to give easy quotes to foreign correspondents.
-
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.
-
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
-
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.
-
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.