P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
The day was warm and clear. Kids were playing soccer in the parking lots and women were sunning their babies and having their tea all over the lawns. The scene was entirely too cheery for journalism.
-
There's such a self-conscious balance that goes into television. Also, these are not people that think things through.
-
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.
-
From National Lampoon, you go directly to Saturday Night Live, because it's a lot of the same people.
-
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.
-
Wearing a hat implies that you are bald if you are a man and that your hair is dirty if you are a woman.
-
Never do anything to a clitoris with your teeth that you wouldn't do to an expensive waterproof wristwatch.
-
It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China's one-child policy or America's one-parent policy.
-
I was managing editor for a while [in National Lampoon ], and it does cause business problems when your circulation goes up.
-
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.
-
Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Normally, the job sucks but work is kinda fun, because you see your friends and flirt with girls and stuff.
-
A world government run by the UN will be like getting an old, purblind, half-deaf substitute teacher.