P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it.
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America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness - divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.
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Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.
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The prevalence of mobile homes does not correspond with the prevalence of poverty, or with much of anything else. All that can be confidently said about America's mobile homes is that they are massed in places where you wouldn't want to be in one. Florida's mobile homes lie athwart the path of hurricanes. Georgia's are in the way of tornadoes.
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Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
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The problem isn't a Congress that won't cut spending or a president who won't raise taxes. The problem is an American public with a bottomless sense of entitlement to federal money.
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Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.
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The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
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I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
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The Tea Party has definitely increased political involvement, not only among Tea Party members but among people who oppose the Tea Party members. It's been a general stimulus.
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We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.
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How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?
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In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.
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Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn't matter.
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Maybe a vague president and an incompetent and somewhat corrupt administration is what the nation needs.
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Taxi drivers all over the world, by the way, are under Newspaper Guild contract to give easy quotes to foreign correspondents.
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You're never going to read 'The Wealth of Nations,' and you shouldn't, really. It's 900 pages.
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Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.
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The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
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TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.
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Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.
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People love to be told what they know already.
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When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he's saving a parking place.
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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.