P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Politics is the one field you don't age out of.
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Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs.
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No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.
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Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
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Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.
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Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right.
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The killjoys initiated automobile crash standards so rigorous that we can't buy a car that hasn't been dropped from the top of a phone pole with our whole family strapped inside.
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The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them to be responsible on the various adventures they have on their way to those goals, good, bad, and otherwise.
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Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
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In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
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The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
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Maybe the real secret to America's greatness is that we hate one another.
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Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.
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Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization - an appeal to civilization itself.
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I believe in God. God created the world.
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President Obama has contempt for real money.
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People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'
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Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.
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Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn't exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.
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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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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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Americans are good at pursuing happiness. And the Americans who pursue happiness most diligently show that we're also good at running it down and killing it.
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We all know the types who listen to Pete Seeger songs; even Pete admits they aren't interesting.
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A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitches. It's as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the 'Iliad' while playing a lyre.