Words matter. These are the best P. J. O’Rourke Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.
Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.
We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.
America gives every appearance of being a nation besotted with trashiness – divorce, illegitimacy, casual Fridays.
We journalists don’t have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.
We all know the types who listen to Pete Seeger songs; even Pete admits they aren’t interesting.
Maybe the real secret to America’s greatness is that we hate one another.
America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being ‘hegemonistic’, of engaging in ‘unilateralism’, of behaving as if we’re the only nation on earth that counts. We are.
Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn’t exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.
There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.
Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician.
America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don’t think that way. We don’t think much at all, thank God.
Like it or not, I’ve come to appreciate soccer. Any kid can play, which fits with the inclusive agenda of progressive schools. Although the corollary to ‘any kid can play’ is that every kid must play because there is an iron grip to the warm hug of progressive inclusionism.
My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.
The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.
I’m too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom’s earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.
Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn’t matter.
Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude.
Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.
Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won’t dig up the pretty lawn, won’t plant anything for fear of getting dirty, and they use fragrant bath salts from The Body Shop instead of smelly compost.
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.
Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.
We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.
Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.
Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.
I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.
There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
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.
I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom.
Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you’re handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it’s over.
Medical researchers don’t know much about head lice because they don’t much care. The reason that they don’t much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.
Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I’ve been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.
Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
The District of Columbia is an extreme example of disconnect between financial input and educational outcome. Unfortunately, extreme is not the same as abnormal.
People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.
A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style – and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.
We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.
The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
I think the Baby Boom has enjoyed itself, maybe sometimes a little too much, and we’re continuing to enjoy ourselves, maybe a little too much.
There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.
I’m fascinated by political enthusiasm.
America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.
There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.
We loved cars until the ’70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
President Obama has contempt for real money.
My generation of Americans was the first to really care about racism and sexism, not to mention the I Ching, plus, of course, the Earth.
The First Amendment only says ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.’ It can disrespect all it wants.
Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don’t count modern civilization.
Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.
I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
Corporate corruption has ecological merits. It’s helping to preserve that species known as Democrats – thought to be endangered as recently as the year 2000.
You’ve got to understand, people are motivated by fun. And they should be.
A deadly sins addendum is long overdue. Life has changed since Pope Gregory the Great scribbled his initial list in the sixth century.
Everybody in America who didn’t come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.
All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.
Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.
Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he’s admiral of the Uzbek Navy.
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.
To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You’d better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.
My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.
The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.
I’ve never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about.
Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.
People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it’s the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.
