P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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.
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I believe in God. God created the world.
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The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.
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If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat - in other words, turn you into an adult.
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In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me.
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I'm a rather decisive type.
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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.
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To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt's is a slur on the poor.
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Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.
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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.
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Politics won't allow for the truth.
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Voting has proliferated in the United States, and it has reached a point where there is now almost one vote available per citizen over the age of eighteen.
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I don't even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I've never used a computer.
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Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?
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America's grossly unfair tax system won't lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief.
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Writing is agony. I hate it.
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Harvard is the home of American ideas.
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We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
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Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
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Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the liberal elite. And we can't blame taxpayers for being reluctant to subsidize the reportorial careers of J-school twerps who should have joined the Peace Corps and gone to Africa to 'speak truth to power' to Robert Mugabe.
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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.
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To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.
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Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.
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One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.