P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Some jobs are worse than actual wives. Ad agency vs. Matrimony, for instance: Even the most capricious and demanding spouse is not going to divorce you for refusing to spend forty hours a week making up lies about toilet paper.
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[Friedrich] Hayek is not protesting that things like child labor and stuff are good. He's just trying to show that when government undertakes to make everything good for everybody, this is what happens. And he addresses it to socialists of all parties.
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Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
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Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
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The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
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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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I believe in God. God created the world.
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Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.
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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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Stupid is a great force in human affairs.
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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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No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.
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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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Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.
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All previous populist movements were demanding things from governments, whereas the Tea Party is saying, 'Give us less, go away.' That's heartening to see.
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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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Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
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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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Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.
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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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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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Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-workers and so on, but actually hate the job they do.
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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.
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People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'