P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
All religions must be made child-proof. Our teachers' unions have done good work in this field, K through 12. Delaying first communions and bar mitzvahs until age 21 would be another positive step.
-
Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place.
-
You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.
-
If you get outside the world of show business and its satellites, there's a whole world of car nuts in the Los Angeles area.
-
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.
-
The great thing about starting golf in your forties is that you can start golf in your forties. You can start other things in your forties but generally your wife makes you stop them, as Bill Clinton found out.
-
The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn't occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn't go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.
-
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 - to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell.
-
Iran and Iraq have been at war for five years now. The traditional present for a fifth anniversary is wood. Here's a gift suggestion: a big stick to beat some goddamned sense into their heads.
-
Christmas begins about the first of December with an office party and ends when you finally realize what you spent, around April fifteenth of the next year.
-
We won't dispassionately investigate or rationally debate which drugs do what damage and whether or how much of that damage is the result of criminalization. We'd rather work ourselves into a screaming fit of puritanism and then go home and take a pill.
-
The motorcycle is a device created by the team of God and Darwin to rid the world of useless young males.
-
I can think of a number of areas in New York where three acres of nuclear waste would make the neighborhood safer to walk around in than it is now, and better lit.
-
War will exist as long as there's a food chain.
-
We like to pile language on language. Hunter [ S. Thompson] was an influence on me, no doubt about it.
-
The U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner's manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world's most unruly, passionate and
-
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.
-
It was Ronald Reagan who used to say that the 10 most frightening words in the English language are, "I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help."
-
I think in the [Bill] Clinton era, if people hadn't been spending vast amounts of time attacking Clinton, they would have found that they had essentially the same problems as they do now.
-
African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.
-
Everybody in 15th century Spain was wrong about where China was and as a result, Columbus discovered Caribbean vacations.
-
Whenever government proposes to get involved in the regulation of trade, just be very, very careful about who's behind this proposal, what their motives are.
-
Then basically what was happening was that it was the middle '80s, and Rolling Stone realized that a lot of their readers had voted for [Ronald] Reagan, and they were going, "Gosh! We need a Republican! Does anybody know a Republican? Wait a minute! I think P.J.'s a Republican!"
-
Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in.