P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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.
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War diminishes both civil and economic rights.
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There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency, and scoreless sports ties are boring.
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We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.
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Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples.
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Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.
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I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
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You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going.
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The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they're living.
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Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
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Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren't present.
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When I left the Lampoon, I went west to try that out, and discovered that I hated it.They were awful people turning out awful product .
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It's the squares who know how to fly the fighter planes and operate the missiles and the bombs and work the M-16s. Liberals would still be fumbling with the federally mandated trigger locks.
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Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jury duty.
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In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America.
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I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
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The baby boomers' politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there's been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.
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After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States.
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I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.
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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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Politics is - once in a while - a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.
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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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The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It's a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.
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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.