P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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There are lots of levels of fear and complaint about the government getting involved in business. First and foremost, of course, is incompetence.
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Summing it Up..."Where's a good place for dinner?" I asked. "There's the Brasserie Lipp on the Avenue St. Germaine," she said, "or La Coupole in Montmartre." "Not La Coupole," I said. "I've been there before. That's the place that's crowded and noisy and smells bad and everybody's rude as hell, isn't it?" "I think you just described France," she said.
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Although computer-generated artificial intelligence eludes us, artificial stupidity has been perfected.
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Man has been breeding livestock for ten thousand years and has yet to come up with a monstrous sheep that can trample buildings and graze a whole golf course for breakfast.
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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.
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Why can't death - if we must have it - be always glorious, as in 'The Iliad?'
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Politics should be limited in scope to ware, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class.
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We should never hesitate to listen to a fool about life because life is pretty foolish as far as I can tell.
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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.
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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.
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How much fame, money and power does a woman have to achieve on her own before you can punch her in the face?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated -- serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.
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Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport- two armed entrées battling to see who'll be dinner.
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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.
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I don't see evidence of America being a poorer country than it was 20 years ago. I've seen impoverished devastation. I've seen places where things had been good and now they were very bad.
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The only really firm rule of taste about cross dressing is that neither sex should ever wear anything they haven't yet figured out how to go to the bathroom in.
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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.
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Everybody in 15th century Spain was wrong about where China was and as a result, Columbus discovered Caribbean vacations.