P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
Although computer-generated artificial intelligence eludes us, artificial stupidity has been perfected.
-
If I give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods, I can add ten years to my life. Trouble is, I'll add it to the wrong end.
-
If the dollar weakens, then presumably all the things that we make in the United States - Buicks, for instance - can be sold cheap all over the world, and everyone will be buying our goods, and we'll get all sorts of yen-denominated, or yuan-denominated, or euro-denominated securities, and then everybody else will be worried.
-
Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa.
-
West Germans are tall, pink, pert and orthodontically corrected, with hands, teeth and hair as clean as their clothes and clothes as sharp as their looks. Except for the fact that they all speak English pretty well, they're indistinguishable from Americans.
-
We're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?
-
Why can't death - if we must have it - be always glorious, as in 'The Iliad?'
-
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to collectivists, to people who believe that wealth is best obtained by redistribution, and that message is clear and concise . . . Egalitarianism is sinful; it's also cowardly.
-
I like to take things that are boring-but-important and try to make them interesting. That was definitely what I was after with Eat The Rich.
-
How much fame, money and power does a woman have to achieve on her own before you can punch her in the face?
-
The Vietnamese Hoa were merchants and manufacturers. They were very successful and thus, according to the logic of Marxism, responsible for society's failures. The Hoa suffered the same fate as the pizza parlour in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing except at the hands of the world's fourth largest army instead of a small, petulant movie director.
-
You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.
-
With the war in Iraq, I had the cooperation of the Department of Defense. Kuwait was pretty eager to get American journalists in there, to show us what a wonderful place they are, and what great allies they are to America, even though they didn't actually fight in the war.
-
We should never hesitate to listen to a fool about life because life is pretty foolish as far as I can tell.
-
Ever read any Friedrich Hayek? He's great. The Road To Serfdom is like... I'm not a big political-science reader, but I actually dog-eared my copy. I ended up going back through it and writing a précis, I was so impressed by this book. It's all about what happens when government tries to make everything right.
-
It's much better to have your arguments dismissed because you might be joking than to have your arguments dismissed because you're not telling the truth.
-
Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place.
-
Now majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But like other precious, sacred things .... it's not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza.
-
Michael O'Donoghue was a very close friend of mine - very encouraging with my stuff, and really a great guy - but he was a no-kidding difficult person.
-
There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.
-
The sport of skiing consists of wearing three thousand dollars worth of clothes and equipment and driving two hundred miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and get drunk.
-
Think about last time you were broke ... now how well did it go with spending your way out of it? Did that work?
-
The Lampoon started in 1970, and I began writing freelance for them around the end of 1971, and then all through '72. They hired me in '73, and I left early in '81. I did everything from low puns to being editor-in-chief.
-
Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.