P.J. O'Rourke - Quotes 301-387
Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.
P.J. O'Rourke
Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit.
P.J. O'Rourke
Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my family is.
P.J. O'Rourke
A careful reading of 50 Simple Things leaves you wondering whether you're going to die from environmental disaster or intellectual annoyance. Failing either, you can worry yourself to death.
P.J. O'Rourke
American children grow up to be valuable citizens. Bangladeshi children grow up to be part of the world population problem.
P.J. O'Rourke
Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.
P.J. O'Rourke
You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
P.J. O'Rourke
FDA employees are first-class agonizers, world champions at losing sleep. When Meryl Streep got hysterical about Alar, they actually checked the apples instead of Meryl's head.
P.J. O'Rourke
Remember, FDA employees are serious about fear. We pay these people to panic about an iota of rodent hair in our chili, even when the recipe calls for it.
P.J. O'Rourke
Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free - indeed, sanctimonious - way for 'progressives' to be racists.
P.J. O'Rourke
Island logic also tells us that an increase in habitat size means an increase in number of species. But it doesn't necessarily. You can build your bed as large as you like and still get very few people to sleep with you.
P.J. O'Rourke
Schneider has made a career of telling the public that the climate is going to change drastically any time now, and indeed every spring and fall he's been right.
P.J. O'Rourke
People with a mission to save the earth want the earth to seem worse than it is so their mission will look more important.
P.J. O'Rourke
People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.
P.J. O'Rourke
When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government.
P.J. O'Rourke
There's only one secret to bachelor cooking - not caring how it tastes.
P.J. O'Rourke
Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.
P.J. O'Rourke
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.
P.J. O'Rourke
Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.
P.J. O'Rourke
Everything on a boat has a different name than it would have if it weren't on a boat. Either this is ancient seafaring tradition or it's how people who mess around with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished college.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.
P.J. O'Rourke
The world is built on discrimination of the most horrible kind. The problem with South Africans is they admit it.
P.J. O'Rourke
Fishing... is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.
P.J. O'Rourke
To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage weltschmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?
P.J. O'Rourke
Anything that makes your mother cry is fun.
P.J. O'Rourke
These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.
P.J. O'Rourke
Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
P.J. O'Rourke
Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.
P.J. O'Rourke
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?
P.J. O'Rourke
In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
P.J. O'Rourke
There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
P.J. O'Rourke
Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.
P.J. O'Rourke
Most of the research about species extinction has been conducted on islands because islands are controlled environments and scientists can get drinks with little umbrellas in them there.
P.J. O'Rourke
Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa.
P.J. O'Rourke
There is a fine line in the Third World between half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe and half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe so they can throw you in jail.
P.J. O'Rourke
Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.
P.J. O'Rourke
In Japan people drive on the left. In China people drive on the right. In Vietnam it doesn't matter.
P.J. O'Rourke
Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
P.J. O'Rourke
It's hard to come back from the Balkans and not sound like a Pete Seeger song.
P.J. O'Rourke
Haitians weren't screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is.
P.J. O'Rourke
Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.
P.J. O'Rourke
Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked 'What's the big idea?' knows, most big ideas are bad ones.
P.J. O'Rourke
I suspect the Haitian Ministry of Health's principal contribution to health in Haiti is providing nice, healthy jobs to those Haitians with the connection to get them.
P.J. O'Rourke
If Martin Luther were a modern ecologist, he would have to nail ninety-five T-shirts to the church door in Wittenberg.
P.J. O'Rourke
Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind, goddamnit!
P.J. O'Rourke
Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.
P.J. O'Rourke
... two key rules of Third World travel:
1. Never run out of whiskey.
2. Never run out of whiskey.
P.J. O'Rourke
War is a great asshole magnet.
P.J. O'Rourke
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
P.J. O'Rourke
And the typical old-fashioned diet was so bad it almost resembled modern dieting.
P.J. O'Rourke
Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help mom do the dishes.
P.J. O'Rourke
And biotechnology is a worry. What if they take genetic material from wet noodles and blowfish and splice it into politician chromosomes and create a Clinton administration?
P.J. O'Rourke
Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place.
P.J. O'Rourke
Man has been breeding livestock for ten thousand years and has yet to come up with a monstrous sheep that can trample buildings and graze a whole golf course for breakfast.
P.J. O'Rourke
Being gloomy is easier than being cheerful. Anybody can say 'I've got cancer' and get a rise out of a crowd. But how many of us can do five minutes of good stand-up comedy?
P.J. O'Rourke
When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.
P.J. O'Rourke
I guess the argument of contextuality is that anything is okay as long as it's done by people who are sufficiently unlike you.
P.J. O'Rourke
'Malthus,', says Vice President Al Gore in Earth in the Balance, 'was right in predicting that the population would grow geometrically.' Al, as the father of four children, should know.
P.J. O'Rourke
If the politics of disease are to be understood, particularly in the dreadful countries where this understanding is most needed, then the politics of total collapse have to be understood first.
P.J. O'Rourke
When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it is (certain body parts excepted) done away with. But a public entity gets bigger.
P.J. O'Rourke
If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.
P.J. O'Rourke
There's one more terrifying fact about old people: I'm going to be one soon.
P.J. O'Rourke
Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
P.J. O'Rourke
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P.J. O'Rourke
The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.
P.J. O'Rourke
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.
P.J. O'Rourke
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.
P.J. O'Rourke
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
P.J. O'Rourke
If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.
P.J. O'Rourke
And Harvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage industry.
P.J. O'Rourke
Every generation finds the drug it needs.
P.J. O'Rourke
The forces of safety are afoot in the land. I, for one, believe it is a conspiracy - a conspiracy of Safety Nazis shouting 'Sieg Health' and seeking to trammel freedom, liberty, and large noisy parties.
P.J. O'Rourke
I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it.
P.J. O'Rourke
What would be a road hazard anywhere else, in the Third World is probably the road.
P.J. O'Rourke
Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.
P.J. O'Rourke
I've always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He'd have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with.
P.J. O'Rourke
Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.
P.J. O'Rourke
There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.
P.J. O'Rourke
Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say.
P.J. O'Rourke
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
P.J. O'Rourke
No government proposal more complicated than 'This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private' ever works.
P.J. O'Rourke
The body politic produces noisome and unseemly substances, among which are politicians.
P.J. O'Rourke
If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.
P.J. O'Rourke
Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren't present.
P.J. O'Rourke
