P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?
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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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It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things.
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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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It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China's one-child policy or America's one-parent policy.
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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.
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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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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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In the American political system, you're only allowed to have real ideas if it's absolutely guaranteed that you can't win an election
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When are the world's political parties going to get appropriate symbols: snake, louse, jackal, ... trash can, clown face, ... dollar bill with bat wings on it?
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The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.
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I was managing editor for a while [in National Lampoon ], and it does cause business problems when your circulation goes up.
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I remember thinking cocaine was subtle until I noticed I'd been awake for three weeks and didn't know any of the naked people passed out around me.
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Never Refuse Wine. It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone who doesn't drink must be an alcoholic.
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A girl who is really pretty - whether she wraps herself in an abayah, a nun's habit, or the front hall rug - never wraps herself so that the world can't tell.
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There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed.... Trouble doesn't come from Slopes, Kikes, Niggers, Spics or White Capitalist Pigs; it comes from the heart.
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How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.
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Then there's politics. Just imagine politics with its dumbbell element subtracted. There would be no Republican candidates. There would be no Democratic voters. The whole system would collapse.
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Most of the people who have grabbed hold of climate change and greenhouse gases, pollution, oil dependency - they have another motive, and their motive is to attain the appearance of virtue without having actually done anything virtuous.
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It is important to remember when reading Adam Smith or even when just thinking about Smith that the era that he lived in, we're not talking about poverty in a day when it meant not enough bedrooms for the kids, an old car, a black and white television. We're talking about a whole world where poverty meant not enough to eat.
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Hunter S. Thompson brings a lunatic genius to ordinary events, and I bring an ordinary sensibility to lunatic events.
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My Grandmother wouldn't even speak the word Democrat if there were children in the room, she'd say Bastards instead.
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The Constitution is an equally forthright piece of work and quite succinct ... giving the complete operating instructions for a nation of 250 million people. The manual for a Toyota Camry, which only seats five, is four times as long.