P.J. O'Rourke - Quotes 1-387
Cuba isn't exactly the future most of us have planned for our kids. Unless we're really mad at the little buggers.
P.J. O'Rourke
Democracy is a bulwark against tyranny - unless the demos get tyrannical. People can vote themselves poor, as the Swedes seem to be trying to do.
P.J. O'Rourke
A friend of mine got a colonoscopy and they didn't find anything up there except his 2008 vote for Obama.
P.J. O'Rourke
I overheard my nine-year-old daughter scolding her little brother. Her admonition should be a motto for everyone in business, politics, media, entertainment, and the arts: 'Don't believe everything you say.'
P.J. O'Rourke
The complexity of economics can be calculated mathematically. Write out the algebraic equation that is the human heart and multiply each unknown by the population of the world.
P.J. O'Rourke
Vast sections of Tanzania are infected with sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly. The fly's devastating effects are similar to those of other known sleeping sickness carriers, the tsetse professor, and the tsetse boss.
P.J. O'Rourke
We know nothing about where political systems come from. We don't even know where they don't come from. And considering the shiftless, slave-trading, bed-hopping, debt-ducking (and that's just Thomas Jefferson) nature of America's founding fathers, who also included rum-soaked bunkum merchants and Indian-massacring land swindlers (and they all oppressed women and weren't vegans) we should be careful about saying that certain societies or nationalities or religious persuasions aren't 'ready for democracy.'
P.J. O'Rourke
The U.S. has had a broad range of poverty programs for 30 years. Those programs have failed. Millions of people are still poor. And those people vote for politicians who favor keeping the poverty programs in place. There's a conspiracy theory in there somewhere.
P.J. O'Rourke
Political systems must love poverty - they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor.
P.J. O'Rourke
With Epcot Center the Disney Corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of make-believe that's worse than regular life.
P.J. O'Rourke
Drugs have taught an entire generation of Americans the metric system.
P.J. O'Rourke
Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.
P.J. O'Rourke
People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.
P.J. O'Rourke
There are no kinder or better people in the world than those who listen to you when you are 18.
P.J. O'Rourke
Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
P.J. O'Rourke
You say we (reporters) are distracting from the business of government. Well, I hope so. Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.
P.J. O'Rourke
It's the squares who know how to fly the fighter planes and operate the missiles and the bombs and work the M-16s. Liberals would still be fumbling with the federally mandated trigger locks.
P.J. O'Rourke
Even a band of angels can turn ugly and start looting if enough angels are unemployed and hanging around the Pearly Gates convinced that all the succubi own all the liquor stores in Heaven.
P.J. O'Rourke
Liberals hate wealth, they say, on grounds of economic injustice - as though prosperity were a pizza, and if I have too many slices, you're left with nothing but a Domino's box to feed your family.
P.J. O'Rourke
Well the planet I've got a chance to visit is Earth, and Earth's principal features are chaos and war. I think I'd be a fool to spend years here and never have a look.
P.J. O'Rourke
Concerning the free market, politicians are cheerleaders who have themselves confused with the people who carried the ball. And many politicians are cheerleaders for the other side.
P.J. O'Rourke
Voting in the House of Representatives is done by means of a little plastic card with a magnetic strip on the back - like a VISA card but with no, that is, absolutely no, spending limit.
P.J. O'Rourke
Ann Coulter to me is someone who says things that I say all the time, but I say them at three in the morning when I'm drunk as a monkey. She says them at three in the afternoon stone sober in bright daylight.
P.J. O'Rourke
I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.
P.J. O'Rourke
I believe that Western civilization, after some disgusting glitches, has become almost civilized. I believe it is our first duty to protect that civilization. I believe it is our second duty to improve it. I believe it is our third duty to extend it if we can.
P.J. O'Rourke
Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.
P.J. O'Rourke
Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about 'character issues.' Either that or just go ahead and determine the presidency with three-legged races and pie-eating contests. It would make better TV.
P.J. O'Rourke
Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated - serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.
P.J. O'Rourke
Health care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting a high-powered corporate lawyer - Hillary - in charge of making it cheaper. (This is what I always do when I want to spend less money - hire a lawyer from Yale.) If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
P.J. O'Rourke
Smoking crack is a way for people who couldn't afford college to study the works of Charles Darwin.
P.J. O'Rourke
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
P.J. O'Rourke
Never refuse wine. It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone who doesn't drink must be an alcoholic.
P.J. O'Rourke
Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.
P.J. O'Rourke
I'm not a liberal so I have a poor grasp of stuff I don't know anything about.
P.J. O'Rourke
An important person should be treated exactly like anyone else holding a gun at your head.
P.J. O'Rourke
What use is it to endure the Dutch Rubs and Indian Rope Burns that are politics if you can't obtain mastery over people and give them noogies back?
P.J. O'Rourke
I suppose I should get a VCR, but the only thing I like about television is its ephemerality.
P.J. O'Rourke
Mass transit helps preserve nature in places like Yellowstone Park, the Everglades and the Arctic wilderness, because mass transit doesn't go there.
P.J. O'Rourke
Boring others is a form of aggression, and Hillary attacks her public with the weapon of brutal dullness.
P.J. O'Rourke
The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.
P.J. O'Rourke
There are two organizations pushing for change in November - al Qaeda and the Democratic Party. And they both have the same message: 'We're going to fix you, America.' On the whole, the terrorists have a more straightforward plan for fixing things. They're going to blow themselves up. Although, come to think of it, Howard Dean did that.
P.J. O'Rourke
We are endowed with a moral capacity that animals, plants, rocks - and many fervent ecologists - lack. We should not be dirty, wasteful or cruel. To do so harms others. That's wrong. Therefore we don't disembowel Bambi like the way coyotes do, we shoot him first.
P.J. O'Rourke
There's no telling what might have happened to our defense budget if Saddam Hussein hadn't invaded Kuwait that August and set everyone gearing up for World War II. Can we count on Saddam Hussein to come along every year and resolve our defense-policy debates? Given the history of the Middle East, it's possible.
P.J. O'Rourke
Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner's Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while a Madonna tune lasts little more than three minutes.
P.J. O'Rourke
The main reason to be opposed to political control of smoking is to keep power - even the smallest and silliest kind of power - out of the hands of... members of a dangerous class - the class that knows what's good for us better than we do.
P.J. O'Rourke
Hong Kong is the best contemporary example of laissez faire. The economic theory of 'allow to do' holds that all sorts of doings ought, indeed, to be allowed, and that government should interfere only to keep the peace, ensure legal rights, and protect property.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 - to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell.
P.J. O'Rourke
When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.
P.J. O'Rourke
About 5.5 percent of America's gross national product goes to defense. Wouldn't you be willing to spend 5.5 percent of your income to guarantee the safety of your spouse, kids, house, car, savings, investments, and sports and hobby equipment? Not only would you - add up your car insurance, life insurance, and homeowner's insurance premiums - you do.
P.J. O'Rourke
For nearly two generations, since the middle of the Great Depression, we've been hearing that to be president of the United States is almost more of a job than one man can handle. Yet consider some of the men who've held this job, and tell me how true this can be.
P.J. O'Rourke
Baby boomers don't vote for baby boomers. We know us. We're nuts. We don't want anyone in our generation anywhere near the ICBM launch codes. We might start channeling Ozzie Osborne.
P.J. O'Rourke
Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, 'Dad burned the dinner, let's get the dog to cook.'
P.J. O'Rourke
Collectivism makes for a very large and, hence, very powerful group. This power is centralized in the government. Any power is open to abuse.
P.J. O'Rourke
The duties of the Supreme Court are the simplest and best defined of any part of government. The Supreme Court justices have to do nothing but sit and let others make ugly fools of themselves in front of the Supreme Court bench.
P.J. O'Rourke
Golf... combines two favorite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with a stick.
P.J. O'Rourke
Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it's cute but boring and expensive.
P.J. O'Rourke
Liberalism is just Communism sold by the drink.
P.J. O'Rourke
I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.
P.J. O'Rourke
You're never too poor to clean your front yard.
P.J. O'Rourke
'The housing authority, they treat us like a dog,' as one woman who'd lived in a Newark project for 13 years put it. This was an untruth. There are laws about keeping dogs in places like these.
P.J. O'Rourke
Whenever I'm in the middle of conformity, surrounded by oneness of mind with people oozing concurrence on every side, I get scared. And when I find myself agreeing with everybody, too, I get terrified.
P.J. O'Rourke
Politicians are not only likable and interested in people, they even tell the truth sometimes. (Though whether this says a lot for politicians or very little for the truth depends.)
P.J. O'Rourke
When government takes wealth from those who produce it, people become less inclined to produce more of it - or more inclined to hide it. Conversely, when government gives wealth to those who don't produce it, they too become less productive since they're already getting what they'd produce in return for not producing it.
P.J. O'Rourke
How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.
P.J. O'Rourke
When government quits being something we use only in an emergency and becomes the principal source of aid and assistance in our society, then the size, expense and power of government are greatly increased. The decision that politicians are wiser, kinder and more honest than we are and that they, not we, should control the dispensation of eleemosynary goods and services is, in itself, a diminishment of the individual and proof that we're jerks.
P.J. O'Rourke
Of course politicians don't tell the truth: 'I am running for the U.S. Senate in order to even the score with those grade-school classmates of mine who, 35 years ago, gave me the nickname Fish Face,' or, 'Please elect me to Congress so that I can get out of the Midwest and meet bigwigs and cute babes.'
P.J. O'Rourke
The credit card debt that you've run up is essentially a junk bond held by Visa. There's no collateral except the Benetton sweater that the dog chewed. There's a good reason you get soaked on your credit card balances.
P.J. O'Rourke
The neo-hippie-dips, the sentimentality-crazed iguana anthropomorphizers, the Chicken Littles, the three-bong-hit William Blakes - thank God these people don't actually go outdoors much, or the environment would be even worse than it is already.
P.J. O'Rourke
A good politician can be two places at once when it comes to public appearances, just as a good politician can be no place at several different times when it comes to public issues.
P.J. O'Rourke
When it's better for enthusiastic and ambitious professionals to go to work for a country's government than it is for them to go to work, the country is in trouble. In China they probably make government jobs awful on purpose.
P.J. O'Rourke
In order to understand the stock market we have to realize that, like anything enormous and inert, it's fundamentally stable, and, like anything emotion-driven, its volatile as hell. Got that? Me neither.
P.J. O'Rourke
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.
P.J. O'Rourke
There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.
P.J. O'Rourke
Manners are the formal and ceremonial manifestations of a society's underlying values. Usually these values are things like loyalty, altruism, veneration of the elderly, valor, etc.
P.J. O'Rourke
Of course, a liberal would say that a sharing and caring government doesn't have to turn out this way. It could be something like Sweden. And there you have it - the downside: 100 million people killed; the upside: ABBA, Volvos and suicide.
P.J. O'Rourke
Federal balanced budget amendment proposals are like trying to stop smoking by hiding cigarettes from yourself and then leaving a note in your pocket telling you where they are.
P.J. O'Rourke
The good news is I balanced the federal budget. It took me all morning but I did it. You're probably wondering how a middle-aged amateur who can't count to three without removing a mitten did this. It helps that I am not up for reelection to the position of being me.
P.J. O'Rourke
We don't want to drive the president out of office until we know for sure whether Al Gore is an alien cyborg. Sure, he looked human when he debated Perot, but I understand it blew out two-thirds of his circuits.
P.J. O'Rourke
No, it turns out Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction. And how crazy does that make Saddam? All he had to do was tell Hans Blix, 'Look anywhere you want. Look under the bed. Look beneath the couch. Look behind the toilet tank in the third presidential palace on the left, but keep your mitts off my copies of Maxim.' And Saddam could have gone on dictatoring away until Donald Rumsfeld gets elected head of the World Council of Churches. But no…
P.J. O'Rourke
Children from the age of five to ten should watch more television. Television depicts adults as rotten SOBs, given to fistfights, gunplay, and other mayhem. Kids who believe this about grownups aren't likely to argue about bedtime.
P.J. O'Rourke
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.
P.J. O'Rourke
It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite pet. People like pets to possess the same qualities they do. Cats are irresponsible and recognize no authority, yet are completely dependent on others for their material needs. Cats cannot be made to do anything useful. Cats are mean for the fun of it.
P.J. O'Rourke
There's a lot of debate on this subject - about what kind of car handles best. Some say a front-engined car, some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind.
P.J. O'Rourke
The purpose of a funeral service is to comfort the living. It is important at a funeral to display excessive grief. This will show others how kind-hearted and loving you are and their improved opinion of you will be very comforting.
P.J. O'Rourke
Skiing consists of wearing $3,000 worth of clothes and equipment and driving 200 miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and drink.
P.J. O'Rourke
I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don't let it bother me. I don't let it bother me for one simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.
P.J. O'Rourke
Wealth makes materialism easier to bear.
P.J. O'Rourke
The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
P.J. O'Rourke
The bullying of citizens by means of dreads and fights has been going on since Paleolithic times. Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than the tribal Wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. 'Oh no, Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out.'
P.J. O'Rourke
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money - if a gun is held to his head.
P.J. O'Rourke
Republicans intend to pursue the war in Iraq but to do so with a minimal number of troops on the ground. This is not to be confused with the disastrous Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policy of using a minimal number of troops on the ground to pursue the war in Iraq. Democrats intend to end the war, but they don't know when. Democrats are making the 'high school sex promise': I'll pull out in time, honest!
P.J. O'Rourke
Incidentally, there's a balanced position that all of America's presidential candidates could take on the controversial abortion issue. If they want votes they shouldn't campaign to make abortion illegal or legal. They should campaign to make it retroactive. If a kid reaches 25 and he or she is still jobless, feckless, and sitting around Starbucks acting like a - no offense - European, then whack.
P.J. O'Rourke
Government isn't a good way to solve problems. Government is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. Government is wasteful of the nation's resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. Government is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence or fame.
P.J. O'Rourke
Each American embassy comes with two permanent features - a giant anti-American demonstration and a giant line for American visas. Most demonstrators spend half their time burning Old Glory and the other half waiting for green cards.
P.J. O'Rourke
We want someone familiar and reassuring in the White House, someone like us. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we secretly wanted to be president ourselves. What could be more familiar than that? And who's more like us than we are? 'Hey, the place really is oval. Cool desk. Where do they keep 'the button'? Let's send the helicopter out for Chinese.'
P.J. O'Rourke
The term consumerism has been current since the middle 1960s... Literally interpreted, the word means 'an ideology based on the opposite of being productive.' This ideology has caused enormous changes in the American economy. At one time complaining was a cottage industry. The typical maker of complaints gave them to (or traded them with) friends and family members. Sometimes the complaints were sent to newspapers or included in prayers. Friends, family, the press and God then ignored the complaints.
P.J. O'Rourke
It's better to spend money like there's no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there's no money.
P.J. O'Rourke
Fame is a communicable disease. If you get screwed by someone who's got it, you may catch it yourself.
P.J. O'Rourke
Guns are always the best method for private suicide. Drugs are too chancy. You might miscalculate the dosage and just have a good time.
P.J. O'Rourke
There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
P.J. O'Rourke
A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of defense.
P.J. O'Rourke
Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since.
P.J. O'Rourke
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.
P.J. O'Rourke
Nothing makes an awful secret like a secret Negro... Up North, confess your bloodline freely. There's nothing a Northerner likes better than a black person who is completely white. Do not, however, try this trick with real blacks. They could give a shit... (If you travel in very sophisticated circles, you may want to turn Marcus Aurelius into Moses Schmeckle. Racism is very lower-class. Upper-class people are never racists; they're anti-Semites.)
P.J. O'Rourke
We're told cars are dangerous. It's safer to drive through South Central Los Angeles than to walk there. We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it's hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald's from a speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?
P.J. O'Rourke
I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit.
P.J. O'Rourke
Foreigners may pretend otherwise, but if English is spoken loudly enough, anyone can understand it, the British included. Actually, there's no such thing as a foreign language. The world is just filled with people who grunt and squeak instead of speaking sensibly. French may be an exception. But since it's impossible to figure out what French people are saying, we'll never know for sure.
P.J. O'Rourke
The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know.
P.J. O'Rourke
Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please.
P.J. O'Rourke
Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.
P.J. O'Rourke
Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.
P.J. O'Rourke
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
P.J. O'Rourke
When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.
P.J. O'Rourke
A charity ball is like a dance except it's tax deductible.
P.J. O'Rourke
Saddam Hussein was reduced to the Unabomber - Ted Kaczynski - a nutcase hiding in the sticks. Sure, the terrorism by his supporters is frightening. Hence, its name, 'terrorism.' Killing innocent people by surprise is not called 'a thousand points of light.' But, as frightening as terrorism is, it's the weapon of losers. The minute somebody sets off a suicide bomb, you can be sure that person doesn't have 'career prospects.' And no matter how horrendous a terrorist attack is, it's still conducted by losers. Winners don't need to hijack airplanes. Winners have an Air Force.
P.J. O'Rourke
The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay.
P.J. O'Rourke
Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country?, contains ten chapters of fulminations convincing the convinced. However, Moore does include one chapter on how to argue with a conservative. As if. Approached by someone like Michael Moore, a conservative would drop a quarter in Moore's Starbucks cup and hurriedly walk away.
P.J. O'Rourke
Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.
P.J. O'Rourke
The people who believe that, as a result of industrial development, life is about to become a hell, or may be one already, are guilty, at least, of sloppy pronouncements. On page 8 of Earth in the Balance, Al Gore claims that his study of the arms race gave him 'a deeper appreciation for the most horrifying fact in all our lives: civilization is now capable of destroying itself.' In the first place, the most horrifying fact in many of our lives is that our ex-spouse has gotten ahold of our ATM card. And civilization has always been able to destroy itself. The Greeks of ancient Athens, who had a civilization remarkable for lack of technological progress during its period of greatest knowledge and power, managed to destroy them fine.
P.J. O'Rourke
In the sixties, however, various consumer advocates began to help complainers find a market for their wares. There is only one organization that is required to take everyone - and their complaints - seriously. So the government became the foremost grumble customer. And it is, of course, the government's bureaucratic agencies who have to do the buying.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes is said to have slept in a barrel. And supposedly it was a happy revelation to him that he could drink out of his cupped palms and thus throw away one more possession: his mug. But Diogenes had a barrel, a fairly complex piece of technology. Compared with the way some Tanzanians exist, Diogenes was a Sharper Image customer.
P.J. O'Rourke
God is an elderly, or at any rate, middle-aged, male. A stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal, and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds man strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of others. He is politically connected, socially powerful, and holds the mortgage on everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God's heavenly country club.
P.J. O'Rourke
The preamble to the Constitution states: 'We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare...' It doesn't say, 'guarantee the general welfare.' And it certainly doesn't say 'give welfare benefits to all the people in the country who aren't doing so well even if the reason they aren't doing so well is because they're sitting on their butts in front of the TV.'
P.J. O'Rourke
Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China and dozens of smaller places around the world did indeed create just such leviathan governmental engines of 'good,' and the dreadful history of the 20th century is in large part a history of the terrible results of these collectivist endeavors. Once respect for the individual is lost, then what do 100 million dead individuals matter - especially if their deaths are for the 'collective good?'
P.J. O'Rourke
The first question of political science is - or should be: 'What is good for everyone?' And, by 'everyone' we must mean 'all individuals.'
P.J. O'Rourke
It is the beauty of well-designed fascism that it gives every piss-ant an ant hill to piss from.
P.J. O'Rourke
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a Parliament of Whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.
P.J. O'Rourke
When somebody screams obscenities at the corner lamppost and relieves himself on your front steps, you can't get that person committed to a mental hospital. But if you walk through the park after 8:00 p.m., all your friends call you crazy. We are not a serious nation.
P.J. O'Rourke
In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system… had been brought to its knees because nobody wanted to wear Bulgarian shoes.
P.J. O'Rourke
The spending of an amount equal to the nation's gross national product in 1987 to relieve poverty has left everybody just sitting around slack jawed and dumbstruck, staring into the maw of that most extraordinary paradox: You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the chickweed on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
P.J. O'Rourke
If you listen to campaign rhetoric, you'll realize that politicians no longer spend money, they invest it. Don't worry about paying more to the Internal Revenue Service. You aren't being taxed; you're taking a plunge on a fly-by-night stock issue.
P.J. O'Rourke
The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta. Each political party is a piñata - a papier-mâché donkey, for example. The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing, comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budge and other goodies. The American voter is blindfolded and given a stick. The voter then swings the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate on the head and knock some sense into the silly bastard.
P.J. O'Rourke
A president provides leadership, but I don't know what that means. There was always a lot of talk about leadership in the Boy Scouts. So maybe the president is the first person in the nation to learn how to tie 25 different knots and the last person to admit he'd rather be necking with girls than building an Indian wigwam.
P.J. O'Rourke
Collectivism doesn't work because it's based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person's 'fair share' of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless.
P.J. O'Rourke
We won't dispassionately investigate or rationally debate which drugs do what damage and whether or how much of that damage is the result of criminalization. We'd rather work ourselves into a screaming fit of Puritanism and then go home and take a pill.
P.J. O'Rourke
A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something Brussels sprouts never do.
P.J. O'Rourke
Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns.
P.J. O'Rourke
Restraining people from demanding ever bigger hand-outs of other people's money is the chief role of government in a democracy. Alexander Tytler, an 18th century Scottish historian and judge, used to insist that democracy could only last as long as people didn't realize that they could vote themselves as much as they wanted from the public treasury.
P.J. O'Rourke
I can remember the antediluvian age of dope hysteria, when the occasional bebop musician's ownership of a Mary Jane cigarette threatened to turn every middle-class American teenager into a sex-crazed car thief. (This particular hysteria proved well-founded. Every middle-class American teenager did try marijuana and did become sex-crazed - although no more car-thievish than usual.)
P.J. O'Rourke
Our Founding Fathers lacked the special literary skills with which modern writers on the subject of government are so richly endowed. When they wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, they found themselves more or less forced to come to the point. So clumsy of thought and pen were the Founders that even today, seven generations later, we can tell what they were talking about.
P.J. O'Rourke
No matter how serious the events I've witnessed, I've never noticed that being serious about them did anything to improve the fate of the people involved.
P.J. O'Rourke
The observers had a logbook recording the assaults, bombings, and artillery attacks on the area. Each page was ruled in vertical columns: DATE, TIME, LOCATION, DAMAGE, CASUALTIES. The columns headed ACTION TAKEN BY THE UN were completely empty.
P.J. O'Rourke
The difference between individual intelligence and group intelligence is the difference between Harvard University and the Harvard University football team.
P.J. O'Rourke
For all we know, the Supreme Court decides cases by playing nude games of Johnny-on-a-pony. This would be a more interesting theory if the members of the Supreme Court were younger and better looking.
P.J. O'Rourke
Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners.
P.J. O'Rourke
My Grandmother wouldn't even speak the word 'Democrat' if there were children in the room, she'd say 'bastards' instead.
P.J. O'Rourke
Relatively uncontrollable spending is not uncontrollable, not even relatively. The president could introduce, and Congress could pass, legislation that would stop it all. But this would leave recipients of government booty - many of whom vote on a regular basis - grouchy. And we don't want that.
P.J. O'Rourke
You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have. Government contains impure ingredients - as anybody who's looked at Congress can tell you.
P.J. O'Rourke
Ignorance is stupid, but education leads to college students. Smart people don't start too many bar fights, but stupid people don't build many hydrogen bombs. Then again, smart people would never drop one. Or would they? Its something we ought to know.
P.J. O'Rourke
Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody? Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.
P.J. O'Rourke
Hollywood stands for unhappiness. It was the most unpleasant work I've ever done in my life. There are thousands of people vying for positions of which there are only a few. Most businesses are not entirely run on the zero-sum game. Hollywood is - anyone else's gain is your loss.
P.J. O'Rourke
You fall in love with perhaps half a dozen people in your life, and a like number of people fall in love with you. But the affections are rarely mutual and almost never contemporary. It is the most irresponsible thing that can be done to let such a coincidence pass and not act upon it.
P.J. O'Rourke
As of early 2004, America didn't seem to have the answers for postwar Iraq. Then again, what were the questions? Was there a bad man? And his bad kids? Were they running a bad country? That did bad things? Did they have a lot of oil money to do bad things with? Were they going to do more bad things? If those were the questions, was the answer 'UN-supervised national reconciliation' or 'rapid return to self-rule'? No. The answer was blow the place to bits. A mess was left behind. But it's a mess without a military to fight aggressive wars; a mess without the facilities to develop dangerous weapons; a mess that cannot systematically kill, torture, and oppress millions of its citizens. It's a mess with a message - don't mess with us.
P.J. O'Rourke
Clinton was everybody's best friend. Except when he wasn't. He conducted undeclared air wars against Serbia and Iraq and launched missiles at Sudan and Afghanistan. Clinton used the military more often than any previous peacetime American president. He sent armed forces into areas of conflict on an average of once every nine weeks.
P.J. O'Rourke
Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there. Previously, all the dinosaurs had died. Paleolithic, Neolithic, and other oddly named men spread. They used fire, but being primitive, they used it for everything - food, clothing, and bodily decoration. Caves were painted, also fixed up and furnished in a simple but attractive style. They were ideal for young couples who were just starting the human race. The Earth was proved flat and there was an extensive series of religious debates that killed everyone with an IQ over 50.
P.J. O'Rourke
Bicycles are childish. Bicycles have their proper place, and that place is under small boys delivering evening papers. Insofar as children are too short to see over the dashboards of cars and too small to keep motorbikes upright at intersections, bikes are suitable vehicles for them. But what do we make of an adult in a suit and tie pedaling his way to work? St. Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, 13:11, said, 'When I became a man, I put away childish things.' He did not say, 'When I became a man, I put away childish things and got more elaborate and expensive childish things from France and Japan.'
P.J. O'Rourke
Because I was curious and wanted a few facts, there are no important people in this book - no interviews with Heads of State or Major Figures On The International Scene. These people didn't get where they are by being dumb enough to tell reporters the truth.
P.J. O'Rourke
There are no earnest messages in this book. Half the world's suffering is caused by earnest messages contained in grand theories bearing no relation to reality - Marxism and No-Fault Auto Insurance, to name two. Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.
P.J. O'Rourke
The Japanese take snapshots of everything, not just everything famous but EVERYTHING. Back in Tokyo there must be a billion color slides of street corners, phone booths, fire hydrants and overhead electrical wires. What are the Japanese doing with all these pictures? Its probably a question we should have asked before Pearl Harbor.
P.J. O'Rourke
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.
P.J. O'Rourke
The principle feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things - war and hunger and date rape - liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things. It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it; you just have to be liberal.
P.J. O'Rourke
If we're going to improve the environment, the first thing we should do is duck the government. The second thing we should do is quit being moral. Screw the rights of nature. Nature will have rights as soon as it gets duties. The minute we see birds, trees, bugs, and squirrels picking up litter, giving money to charity, and keeping an eye on our kids at the park, we'll let them vote.
P.J. O'Rourke
The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology, women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.
P.J. O'Rourke
In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor.
P.J. O'Rourke
How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?
P.J. O'Rourke
I agree with me.
P.J. O'Rourke
Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
P.J. O'Rourke
Politics should be limited in scope to war, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class.
P.J. O'Rourke
Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley!
P.J. O'Rourke
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
P.J. O'Rourke
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country. So maybe he owes all of us an apology.
P.J. O'Rourke
Sen. Ted Kennedy: 'And when the Reagan administration was selling arms to Iran, WHERE WAS GEORGE?' Answer: Dry, sober, and at home with his wife.
P.J. O'Rourke
One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere. I strongly support paper recycling.
P.J. O'Rourke
The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.
P.J. O'Rourke
Life is filled with pain and sorrow, facts which cannot fail to touch the heart of any perceptive American. Therefore no US citizen with an IQ over 110 is sober after 6:00 in the evening.
P.J. O'Rourke
When other countries demand a role in the exercise of global power, America can ask another fundamental American question: 'You and what army?'
P.J. O'Rourke
Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?
P.J. O'Rourke
A woman should dress to attract attention. To attract the most attention, a woman should be either nude, or wearing something as expensive as getting her nude is going to be.
P.J. O'Rourke
The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.
P.J. O'Rourke
You can't get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism.
P.J. O'Rourke
Any rich man does more for society than all the jerks pasting 'Visualize World Peace' bumper stickers on their cars. The worst leech of a merger and acquisitions lawyer making $500,000 a year will, even if he cheats on his taxes, put $100,000 into the public coffers. That's $100,000 worth of education, charity or US Marines. And the Marine Corps does more to promote world peace than all the Ben & Jerry's ice cream ever made.
P.J. O'Rourke
I really didn't understand before that moment, I didn't realize until just then - we won. The Free World won the Cold War. All the people who had been sent to gulags, who'd been crushed in the streets of Budapest, Prague and Warsaw, the soldiers who'd died in Korea and my friends and classmates who had been killed in Vietnam - it meant something now. All the treasure that we in America had poured into guns, planes, Star Wars and all the terrifying A-bombs we'd had to build and keep - it wasn't for nothing.
P.J. O'Rourke
The great religions (and conservatives are known for approving of God) teach salvation as an individual matter. There are no group discounts in the Ten Commandments, Christ was not a committee, and Allah does not welcome believers into Paradise saying, 'You weren't much good yourself, but you were standing near some good people.' That we are individuals - unique, disparate and willful - is something we understand instinctively from an early age. No child ever wrote to Santa: 'Bring me - and a bunch of kids I've never met - a pony, and we'll share.'
P.J. O'Rourke
Washington has lots of those Greek- and Roman-style buildings that practically make you feel like a senator just walking up the steps of them. Senators, in particular, are fond of this feeling, and this is one reason official Washington escaped the worst effects of modern architecture. Also, steel and glass skyscrapers are relatively cheap to build, and cost effectiveness is not a concept here.
P.J. O'Rourke
Majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But - like other precious, sacred things, such as the home and the family - it's not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stonewashed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And - since women are a majority of the population - we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.
P.J. O'Rourke
Government power is not necessarily abused more often than personal power, but when the abuse does come, it's a lulu. At work, power over the whole supply cabinet is concentrated in the person of the office manager. In government, power over the entire military is concentrated in the person of the commander-in-chief. You steal felt tip pens. Hitler invades Poland.
P.J. O'Rourke
Just as some things are too strange for fiction, others are too true for journalism.
P.J. O'Rourke
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
P.J. O'Rourke
If Europeans didn't discover North America then how'd we all get here?
P.J. O'Rourke
Why are conservatives opposed to gun control? In case we have to shoot Democrats. It happened during the Civil War, and it could happen again.
P.J. O'Rourke
There are just two rules of governance in a free society: mind your own business, and keep your hands to yourself.
P.J. O'Rourke
If the Perennially Indignant think pollution is the fault only of Reaganites wallowing in capitalist greed, then they should go take a deep breath in Smolensk or a long drink from the river Volga.
P.J. O'Rourke
Crowded as the country is, is overcrowding even its main problem? Hong Kong and Singapore both have greater population densities (14.315 and 12.347 per square mile, respectively) than Bangladesh, and they're called success stories. The same goes for Monaco. In fact, the whole Riviera is packed in August, and neither Malthus nor Ehrlich have complained about the topless beaches of St. Tropez.
P.J. O'Rourke
Reading about economics after watching a lot of economic activity is like reading the assembly instructions after the Christmas toy has been put together. Certain significant patterns begin to take shape in the mind, even though the instructions are still gibberish and the toy doesn't work.
P.J. O'Rourke
Conservatism is a philosophy that relies upon personal responsibility and promotes private liberty. It is an ideology of individuals. Everyone with any sense and experience in life would rather take his fellows one by one than in a crowd. Crowds are noisy, unreasonable and impatient. They can trample you easier than a single person can. And a crowd will never buy you lunch.
P.J. O'Rourke
Terrible danger lurks in the idea that the government should do more to protect people and give them more of the things they need. France shows you what happens when you base politics on the idea that the government has to give ever-greater protection and benefits to people: the economy simply gets asphyxiated. France's official unemployment rate is 10 per cent; its real rate is probably closer to 40 per cent. Government regulations ensure that business-people can't fire anyone in France. They respond by not hiring anyone.
P.J. O'Rourke
Government contains impure ingredients - as anybody who's looked at Congress can tell you.
P.J. O'Rourke
Just once, I'd love to hear a politician say: 'We're going to bring the second-best minds together to work on this.' The second-best minds are all much more practical people than the first-class guys.
P.J. O'Rourke
In its better forms, conservatism simply says that the structures of society, both civil and political, religious and so on, are the result of a long series of trial-and-error experiments by millions of human beings, not only all over the world, but through time. And that you should toss out received wisdom only very carefully. Obviously there are some ideas that were around for centuries that were not good (slavery comes to mind). But when people have been doing something for a millennium or two, there is probably a reason. And you better be pretty careful before you just throw it out.
P.J. O'Rourke
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
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
