P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
As a result of that, and as a result of friendship, I don't think we've ever been competitive. I mean, there's probably a very good reason Hunter [S. Thompson] isn't jealous of me.
-
One of the things that makes me a conservative, or a libertarian, or whatever the heck it is that I am - a person who doesn't much like big government - is that I do not like the concentration of the power.
-
The commies are the only people on earth who think Star Wars will work. If they're that gullible, maybe we should have held the summit at Atlantic City and let them lose all their missiles playing Keno.
-
If Disney still wants to make Epcot Center futuristic, they could do so by blowing the place up with an atom bomb.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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."
-
Never steal anything so small that you'll have to go to an unpleasant city jail for it instead of a minimum-security federal tennis prison.
-
Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection.
-
A cocktail party is what you call it when you invite everyone you know to come over to your house at six p.m., put cigarettes out on your rug, and leave at eight to go somewhere more interesting for dinner without inviting you.
-
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.
-
The Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.
-
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.
-
So what if I don't agree with the Democrats? What's to disagree with? They believe everything. And what they don't believe, the Republicans do. Neither of them stands for anything they believe in, anyway.
-
Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please.
-
Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.
-
Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite poet. People like poets to possess the same qualities they do.
-
If I bring anything to the table, it's the fact that not everybody realizes they're funny. So I just point a finger.
-
Lampoon was exactly the opposite. The work was a lot of fun, but the office environment was hell. You cannot put 20 humorists together.
-
Something that comes to us, some gym shoe that comes to us as a result of child labor from a brutal dictatorship, where people do not have basic freedoms, it wouldn't bug me to tax the living Dickens out of that thing or even to forbid its importation whatsoever. But that's a moral question, not an economic question.
-
You start out with Mad magazine, and you go right through the sort of black humor of Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Paul Krassner... If you put Lenny together with Mad magazine and run it through the brain of a college student, you get National Lampoon.
-
Journalists are notoriously easy to kid. All you have to do is speak to a journalist in a very serious tone of voice, and he will be certain that you are either telling the truth or a big, important lie.