P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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I like to have interesting things to write about. And when one says something is 'interesting,' one almost always means 'bad.'
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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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Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.
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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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Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.
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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.
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Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician.
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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.
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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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I believe in God. God created the world.
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The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
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The Italians have had two thousand years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place.
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There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.
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Fascism is very much a mob movement.
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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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This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans.
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If you spend 72 hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. Either that or you're President Obama.
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The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life - this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot.
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Obama, in pursuit of power, has been as greedy and irresponsible as any Wall Street tycoon in pursuit of money.
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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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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.
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I'm a political conservative.
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When you pay a hospital bill, you're really paying two hospital bills - one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital. and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital.