P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.
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We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.
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Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.
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Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace.
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We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
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We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren't there.
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Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.
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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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Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.
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Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let's hope so.
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There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
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In midlife, we're as dumb as we get.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?
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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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We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.
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There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
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Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.
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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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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.