P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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I've got a 1990 Porsche 911. It's just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.
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I think every high school student who was alert during the early '60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.
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Philosophy was once considered science.
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The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
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The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay.
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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.
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Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren't present.
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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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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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If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it's a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also - to do the lawn and clean the gutters.
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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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Good manners can replace morals. It may be years before anyone knows if what you are doing is right. But if what you are doing is nice, it will be immediately evident.
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Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
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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.
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Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.
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Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
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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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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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There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.
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Rich parents are famous both for miserliness and astonishing longevity. And, when they finally do die, you'll find they've left their estate in inviolate trust to the golden retrievers.
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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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A careful reading of 50 Simple Things leaves you wondering whether you're going to die from environmental disaster or intellectual annoyance. Failing either, you can worry yourself to death.
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America is the world's policeman, all right -- a big, dumb, mick flatfoot in the middle of the one thing cops dread most, a "domestic disturbance.