P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
I like to have interesting things to write about. And when one says something is 'interesting,' one almost always means 'bad.'
-
Fascism is very much a mob movement.
-
Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.
-
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 Italians have had two thousand years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place.
-
In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.
-
This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans.
-
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.
-
To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt's is a slur on the poor.
-
Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.
-
Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
-
Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.
-
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
-
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.
-
Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
-
Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.
-
Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
-
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.
-
There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.
-
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.
-
Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
-
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
-
Where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity.
-
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.