P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.
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Politics is the one field you don't age out of.
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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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People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'
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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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You've got to understand, people are motivated by fun. And they should be.
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Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
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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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Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.
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Maybe the real secret to America's greatness is that we hate one another.
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The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
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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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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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I believe in God. God created the world.
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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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Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization - an appeal to civilization itself.
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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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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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President Obama has contempt for real money.
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A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.
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Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
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Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.
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I am no stranger to loud noise. I've been to a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels concert. I once dated a woman with two kids.