P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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You can smoke or drink on a golf course without interrupting the game, and you can take a leak - something you can't do on a squash court and shouldn't do in a swimming pool.
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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.
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One of these suburbs is actually named Stalingrad, which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793.
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You'll note that politicians no longer spend money, they invest it. Don't worry about paying more to the [IRS]. You aren't being taxed; you're taking a plunge on a fly-by-night stock issue.
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The poor of the world cannot be made rich by the redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape.
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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.
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From National Lampoon, you go directly to Saturday Night Live, because it's a lot of the same people.
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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.
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When a couple decides to divorce, they should inform both sets of parents before having a party and telling all their friends. This is not only courteous but practical. Parents may be very willing to pitch in with comments, criticism, and malicious gossip of their own to help the divorce along.
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Lampoon ran out of steam in the early '80s, and wasn't able to reinvent itself because it ran out of talent. People who wanted to do this kind of stuff could suddenly make $100,000 in Hollywood right out of college.
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Men generally pay for all expenses on a date ... either sex, however, may bring a little gift, its value to be determined by the bizarrness of the sexual request to be made later that evening.
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Off they go on this sort of camping trip to Iwo Jima, where they're taken around and shown where all the battles took place. It's very moving. Disgusting little island, though. Still an active volcano. Stinks of sulfur. There are dead Japanese everywhere under that island. It's icky. But I knew I would never have another chance to go, so I took the job.
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France in August when you can travel through the entire country without encountering a single pesky Frenchman or being bothered with anything that's open for business.
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It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.
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The real truth about children is they don't speak the language very well. They're physically uncoordinated. And they are ignorant of our elaborate ideas about right and wrong.
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Well the planet I've got a chance to visit is Earth, and Earth's principal features are chaos and war. I think I'd be a fool to spend years here and never have a look.
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In the Third World, honk your horn only under the following circumstances: 1. When anything blocks the road. 2. When anything doesn't. 3. When anything might. 4. At red lights. 5. At green lights. 6. At all other times.
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Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.
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Wearing a hat implies that you are bald if you are a man and that your hair is dirty if you are a woman.
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Apparently Bolivia is the key source of lithium in the world. So we're gonna trade the Saudis for the Bolivians.
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Finally, one night we were smoking pot [with Michael O'Donoghue] and talking about the people that are invariably in high school, whether you go to prep school or public school or ghetto school or rich suburban school. And actually, it spun off from a Kurt Vonnegut quote.
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The Arab peoples possess an ancient and highly developed civilization that is in many ways more sophisticated than our own. For instance, they invented algebra. And this is why we have to go to war with Saddam Hussein this minute and bomb the shish kebab out of him before he invents trig and chemistry and the whole of America flunks high school.
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Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste and style mixed together so that you don't need any of those things.