P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?
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There's something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.
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Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there.
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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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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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Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.
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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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I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
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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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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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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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Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-'60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate.
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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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Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.
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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.
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War diminishes both civil and economic rights.
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We've come into the world of '1984,' but it turns out to be '1984'-Lite.
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Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
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In midlife, we're as dumb as we get.
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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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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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I am no stranger to loud noise. I've been to a Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels concert. I once dated a woman with two kids.
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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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At Epcot Center the Disney corporation has focused its attention on two things greatly in need of Disneyfication: the tedious future and the annoying whole wide world.