P.J. O'Rourke - Quotes 201-300
You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity.
P.J. O'Rourke
In a democracy, everyone steals from everyone else, whereas in all the other systems, a small political elite plunders the population with a ruthlessness and efficiency the people as a whole can never quite manage to do to itself.
P.J. O'Rourke
A walk through an old graveyard shows our ancestors often had more dead children than we have live ones.
P.J. O'Rourke
We all know how 'modern democracies take loaves from the wealthy.' It's the slipups in the 'pass them out to the poor' department that inspire a study of Economics.
P.J. O'Rourke
God created a free universe. He could have created any kind of universe he wanted. But a universe without freedom would have been static and meaningless - the taxpayer-funded-art-in-public-places universe.
P.J. O'Rourke
When are the world's political parties going to get appropriate symbols: snake, louse, jackal, trashcan, clown face, dollar bill with bat wings on it?
P.J. O'Rourke
We had a choice between Democrats who couldn't learn from the past and Republicans who couldn't stop living in it.
P.J. O'Rourke
Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen.
P.J. O'Rourke
Economics is an entire scientific discipline of not knowing what you're talking about.
P.J. O'Rourke
If the gun laws that Massachusetts has now had been in force in 1776, we'd all be Canadians, and you know what kind of weather Canada has.
P.J. O'Rourke
During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?
P.J. O'Rourke
Until 1918 the Arabian peninsula was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, so called because it had the same amount of intelligence and energy as a footstool.
P.J. O'Rourke
There are important lessons to be learned from politics. Lessons such as 'Those who fail to learn history are fated to repeat it.' Or lessons such as 'Those who fail to learn history usually aren't doing so well in English or practical math either.'
P.J. O'Rourke
America is the world's policeman, all right - a big, dumb, mick flatfoot in the middle of the one thing cops dread most, a 'domestic disturbance.'
P.J. O'Rourke
I'm a 47-year old middle-class male with a job. Every hippy-dippy thing that's thought up - from heroin addiction to special vegan lunch lines in the local high school cafeteria - I get to pay for. Of course I'm a Republican.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Democrats say, 'We don't know what's wrong with America, but we can fix it.' The Republicans say, 'There's nothing wrong with America, and we can fix that.'
P.J. O'Rourke
The Platform of the Republican Party Reptiles:
I think our agenda is clear.
We are opposed to: government spending, Kennedy kids, seat-belt laws, busing our children anywhere other than Yale, trailer courts near our vacation homes, all tiny Third World countries that don’t have banking secrecy laws, aerobics, the UN, taxation without tax loopholes, and jewelry on men.
We are in favor of: guns, drugs, fast cars, free love (if our wives don’t find out), a sound dollar, and a strong military with spiffy uniforms.
There are thousands of people in America who feel this way, especially after three or four drinks. If all of us would unite and work together, we could give this country... well, a real bad hangover.
P.J. O'Rourke
Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
P.J. O'Rourke
Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.
P.J. O'Rourke
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
P.J. O'Rourke
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
P.J. O'Rourke
Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools and use it on the teachers.
P.J. O'Rourke
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
P.J. O'Rourke
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.
P.J. O'Rourke
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P.J. O'Rourke
Children must be considered in a divorce valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.
P.J. O'Rourke
You may be surprised to discover you're rich, especially if you're broke.
P.J. O'Rourke
If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
P.J. O'Rourke
After all, what is your host's purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
P.J. O'Rourke
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
P.J. O'Rourke
Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
P.J. O'Rourke
Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
P.J. O'Rourke
Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
P.J. O'Rourke
Pain is the body's way of showing us we're boneheads. A child growing up in an excessively safe environment may never learn that he is one - not until he gets married and has a wife to tell him so.
P.J. O'Rourke
Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
P.J. O'Rourke
I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a 'learning experience.' It makes me feel less stupid.
P.J. O'Rourke
Freddie Aguilar, who's billed as 'the Bob Dylan of the Philippines'. This is unfair, since he's good-looking, plays the guitar well, can carry a tune, and writes songs that make sense.
P.J. O'Rourke
Smoking cigarettes seems to alarm peace activists much more than voting for Reagan does.
P.J. O'Rourke
The interesting thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is where the bullet comes out, yet what a big difference it would make in your social schedule.
P.J. O'Rourke
Industrialization came to England but has since left.
P.J. O'Rourke
The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
P.J. O'Rourke
A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
P.J. O'Rourke
Never fight an inanimate object.
P.J. O'Rourke
There are probably more fact-finding tours of Nicaragua right now than there are facts - the country has shortages of practically everything.
P.J. O'Rourke
In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters.) And everything that isn't fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Safety Nazis advocate gun control, vigorous exercise, and health foods. The result can only be a disarmed, exhausted, and half-starved population ready to acquiesce to dictatorship of some kind.
P.J. O'Rourke
One nice thing about the Third World, you don't have to fasten your seat belt. (Or stop smoking. Or cut down on saturated fats.) It takes a lot off your mind when average life expectancy is forty-five minutes.
P.J. O'Rourke
Everyone's very busy, though not exactly working.
P.J. O'Rourke
It had never occurred to us that the Kremlin's new anti-booze campaign would apply to journalists. Now, that's a human-rights violation.
P.J. O'Rourke
A steady job is at least as deleterious to the spirit of bachelorhood as a steady date. Some jobs are worse than actual wives.
P.J. O'Rourke
To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.
P.J. O'Rourke
There's something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.
P.J. O'Rourke
Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
P.J. O'Rourke
In Western Australia they don't even know how to make that vital piece of sailing-boat equipment, the gin and tonic.
P.J. O'Rourke
Drugs are a one-man birthday party.
P.J. O'Rourke
Women make their beds each morning and they assume everyone - criminals on the lam, animals in their burrows - does the same.
P.J. O'Rourke
If Christ came back tomorrow, He'd have to change planes in Frankfurt. Modern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.
P.J. O'Rourke
A good bachelor drinks his dessert (and sometimes the rest of his meals). A sweet tooth is a danger signal that you're getting too much exercise and not enough cocktails.
P.J. O'Rourke
The most extraordinary change in Moscow was Arbat Street, the USSR's first pedestrian mall. Of course, there's something a little sad about a pedestrian mall in a nation where few people own cars - the whole damn country's a pedestrian mall.
P.J. O'Rourke
You have to wonder about a food that everybody agrees is great except that sometimes it tastes like what it is.
P.J. O'Rourke
Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
P.J. O'Rourke
America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
P.J. O'Rourke
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.
P.J. O'Rourke
Even newlyweds don't spend much time together, now that few marriages outlast the appliance warranties.
P.J. O'Rourke
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.
P.J. O'Rourke
I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.
P.J. O'Rourke
War will exist as long as there's a food chain.
P.J. O'Rourke
Even when they don't know what they're doing, they're doing so much of it that they're still going to get an A.
P.J. O'Rourke
They don't like anyone who isn't Korean, and they don't like each other all that much, either. They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, 'the Irish of Asia'.
P.J. O'Rourke
Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport - two armed entrées battling to see who'll be dinner.
P.J. O'Rourke
The real truth about children is they don't speak the language very well. They're physically uncoordinated. And they are ignorant of our elaborate ideas about right and wrong.
P.J. O'Rourke
It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). And this is not just a Somali problem. We have poverty and deprivation in our own country. Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last.
P.J. O'Rourke
Mankind is supposed to have evolved in the treetops. But I have examined my sense of balance, the prehensility of my various appendages, and my attitude toward standing on anything higher than, say, political principles, and I have concluded that, personally, I evolved in the backseat of a car.
P.J. O'Rourke
I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.
P.J. O'Rourke
Remember, your body needs 6 to 8 glasses of fluid daily. Straight up or on the rocks.
P.J. O'Rourke
Iran and Iraq have been at war for five years now. The traditional present for a fifth anniversary is wood. Here's a gift suggestion: a big stick to beat some goddamned sense into their heads.
P.J. O'Rourke
Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty - their power and privilege - to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by... politicians.
P.J. O'Rourke
Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
P.J. O'Rourke
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P.J. O'Rourke
A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too.
P.J. O'Rourke
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
P.J. O'Rourke
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P.J. O'Rourke
Despite the fact that meat is made from dead animals, it shouldn't smell that way. Try this test for meat freshness: close your eyes and see if you can tell the pork chops from a gym locker.
P.J. O'Rourke
Ecology is the science of everything. Nobody knows everything. Nobody even knows everything about any one thing. And most of us don't know much.
P.J. O'Rourke
The morning meal was served in traditional socialist fashion - very slowly, with the courses out of order so that the jelly arrived half an hour after the toast and the coffee didn't come until we'd called for the check. However, it was hard to be angry at a place that had ice cream, beer, and cigarettes on its breakfast menu.
P.J. O'Rourke
Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them. These two groups bring great pressure to bear upon politicians who have another agenda yet: to cater to the temporary whims and fads of the public and the press.
P.J. O'Rourke
Cleaning, like seduction, should be done from the top down - starting with the ceiling, which is ridiculous. Gravity takes care of that.
P.J. O'Rourke
Never serve oysters during a month that has no paycheck in it.
P.J. O'Rourke
Coffee and cigarettes are much better if you want an instant breakfast.
P.J. O'Rourke
From Virgil a line of direct descent runs for two thousand years to John Denver.
P.J. O'Rourke
The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.
P.J. O'Rourke
Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Italians have had two thousand years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place.
P.J. O'Rourke
For some mysterious Darwinian reason, women feel compelled to straighten up bedrooms before and after sex. Try to make love in every other room of the house.
P.J. O'Rourke
Saigon is like all the other great modern cities of the world. It's the mess left from people getting rich.
P.J. O'Rourke
In a war against hunger, what do you do? Shoot the lunch?
P.J. O'Rourke
Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall gin-and-tonic is the way to save the planet.
P.J. O'Rourke
Any person who has spent time outdoors actually doing something, such as hunting and fishing opposed to standing there with a doobie in his mouth, knows nature is not intrinsically healthy.
P.J. O'Rourke
Traffic was like a bad dog. It wasn't important to look both ways when crossing the street; it was important to not show fear.
P.J. O'Rourke
One thing that's certain about going outdoors: When you come back inside, you'll be scratching.
P.J. O'Rourke
