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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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There's such a self-conscious balance that goes into television. Also, these are not people that think things through.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Never do anything to a clitoris with your teeth that you wouldn't do to an expensive waterproof wristwatch.
P. J. O'Rourke
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From National Lampoon, you go directly to Saturday Night Live, because it's a lot of the same people.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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?
P. J. O'Rourke
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A world government run by the UN will be like getting an old, purblind, half-deaf substitute teacher.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Normally, the job sucks but work is kinda fun, because you see your friends and flirt with girls and stuff.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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?
P. J. O'Rourke
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I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you've half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're doing a hundred miles an hour in a suburban side street.
P. J. O'Rourke
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If the wind is blowing like stink and everything is working right, a twelve-meter sailboat can go eleven and a half or twelve miles an hour, the same speed at which a bond lawyer runs around the Cental Park Reservoir.
P. J. O'Rourke
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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.
P. J. O'Rourke
