P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
Harvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage industry.
-
Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
-
The job of the president of the United States is to talk to the public, is to explain to them. Now, some presidents talk too much, like Bill Clinton. Some presidents try to talk but don't know how, like George Bush senior.
-
Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
-
Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.
-
I'm a rather decisive type.
-
The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind.
-
Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation’s capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.
-
[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.
-
We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
-
The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
-
I have no idea if some societies, anthropologically speaking, aren't really suited for democracy. I don't think that's true.
-
I knew Hunter Thompson since the '70s, and I loved him, but he would wear me out as I got older.
-
Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Why do elites hate the poor? It's xenophobia. They don't know any poor people - except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don't speak English.
-
Politics won't allow for the truth.
-
Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.
-
Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization - an appeal to civilization itself.
-
Writing is agony. I hate it.
-
Disney's House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war.
-
You're never going to read 'The Wealth of Nations,' and you shouldn't, really. It's 900 pages.
-
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.