P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Each American embassy comes with two permanent features - a giant anti-American demonstration and a giant line for American visas. Most demonstrators spend half their time burning Old Glory and the other half waiting for green cards.
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I believe that Western civilization, after some disgusting glitches, has become almost civilized. I believe it is our first duty to protect that civilization. I believe it is our second duty to improve it. I believe it is our third duty to extend it if we can.
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The motorcycle is a device created by the team of God and Darwin to rid the world of useless young males.
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Mankind is supposed to have evolved in the treetops. But I have examined my sense of balance, the prehensility of my various appendages, and my attitude toward standing on anything higher than, say, political principles, and I have concluded that, personally, I evolved in the backseat of a car.
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Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer -- a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.
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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.
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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.
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Whereas Rolling Stone, I just never had anything to do with them. I'd stop by the office maybe twice a year.
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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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The Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.
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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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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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I had grown up as a feature writer, and basically my career had been in The National Lampoon and as a magazine editor, and I'd never been a reporter.
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War will exist as long as there's a food chain.
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Rich white Protestant men have held on to some measure of power in America almost solely by getting women, blacks, and other disadvantaged groups to wear crippling foot fashions. This keeps them too busy with corns and bunions to compete in the job market.
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There's nothing inherently lame about electricity. I've got a basement full of power tools that all operate with electricity, and they're manly items. And when you see a great big locomotive hauling a mile of freight cars, that's a hybrid. A lot of people don't understand that.
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The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you.
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There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.
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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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In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City.