P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
You've got to understand, people are motivated by fun. And they should be.
-
You're never going to read 'The Wealth of Nations,' and you shouldn't, really. It's 900 pages.
-
People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.
-
The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.
-
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.
-
[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.
-
I like to have interesting things to write about. And when one says something is 'interesting,' one almost always means 'bad.'
-
Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization - an appeal to civilization itself.
-
This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans.
-
Writing is agony. I hate it.
-
The Italians have had two thousand years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place.
-
It is important to remember when making jokes about women, that they are not a minority. They weren't captured on another continent and brought here in leg-irons (funny shoes, yes, but not leg-irons) and Hitler didn't blame them for Germany's loss in WWI. Therefore, you can make any kind of fun of them you want.
-
To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt's is a slur on the poor.
-
Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest.
-
The problem isn't a Congress that won't cut spending or a president who won't raise taxes. The problem is an American public with a bottomless sense of entitlement to federal money.
-
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.
-
Fascism is very much a mob movement.
-
Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
-
Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
-
I knew Hunter Thompson since the '70s, and I loved him, but he would wear me out as I got older.
-
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.