P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Whatever the occasion, do not neglect alcohol. No other refreshment will do. Yes, alcohol kills brain cells, but it's very selective. It only kills the brain cells that contain good sense, shame, embarrassment, and restraint.

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

The problem isn't a Congress that won't cut spending or a president who won't raise taxes. The problem is an American public with a bottomless sense of entitlement to federal money.

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.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

So what if I don't agree with the Democrats? What's to disagree with? They believe everything. And what they don't believe, the Republicans do. Neither of them stands for anything they believe in, anyway.

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.

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.

West Germans are tall, pink, pert and orthodontically corrected, with hands, teeth and hair as clean as their clothes and clothes as sharp as their looks. Except for the fact that they all speak English pretty well, they're indistinguishable from Americans.

There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.

There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.

If you spend seventy-two hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter.

When a couple decides to divorce, they should inform both sets of parents before having a party and telling all their friends. This is not only courteous but practical. Parents may be very willing to pitch in with comments, criticism, and malicious gossip of their own to help the divorce along.

The dominant type of humor in the '60s was essentially defensive and self-deprecating, using humor as a shield.

I figured if I could put together being funny about stuff and actual events, maybe I could do something that wasn't being done much. Because the reporters that I met out there were funny, and they had hilarious stories that just didn't fit in the AP/UPI/New York Times foreign-correspondent style. They couldn't use the things they had. But I could.

Some people are better imagined in one's bed than found there in the morning.

Greatest generation came through some stuff that we can't even imagine - the Depression, World War I - and all they wanted after that was a breather and a calm and a quiet life, and they get us.

It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China's one-child policy or America's one-parent policy.

You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.

The Middle Eastern states aren't nations; they're quarrels with borders.

In the past a man was expected to give his seat on a bus to a woman. Today it would be much more courteous for that man to give her his job.

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.

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.

Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.

Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty.

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

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.

[Al] Franken is left-wing and funny. He's a pretty good political humorist.

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.

Then Saturday Night Live spawns... well, everything right down to American Pie 9, where all humor has to be irrelevant, which can get a little tiring.

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.

As long as we are on firm moral ground, as long as we're caring about other people, these are legitimate worries. The minute that we start protecting our own interests in the name of these worries and saying, "Oh, we have to make sure that only Ford Motor Company manufactures cars, because we can't be sure that the cars in other countries are being made quite up to our point of view," we're economically off base, and, of course, we're moral hypocrites, too.

I buy a tractor two years ago, and four-fifths of the tractor manual is about not tipping over, not raising the bucket high enough to hit high-tension wire... not killing yourself, basically. And in that manual, I found out - and it cost me a thousand dollars - that when the tractor is new, 10 hours into use of the tractor, you have to re-torque the lug nuts. If you don't, you will oval the holes. This is buried between the moron warnings. I never found it. I take the tractor in for its regular servicing, and they say my wheels are gone. How am I supposed to know that? "It's in the manual."

If I bring anything to the table, it's the fact that not everybody realizes they're funny. So I just point a finger.

Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.

I don't see evidence of America being a poorer country than it was 20 years ago. I've seen impoverished devastation. I've seen places where things had been good and now they were very bad.

You read [Bill ] Maher's book, and he didn't take Econ 101. All his arguments about gasoline, it's not that they're right or wrong - they're just not informed.

Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

God has no role to play in politics except to make sure politicians go where they belong. To hell.

Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.

Off they go on this sort of camping trip to Iwo Jima, where they're taken around and shown where all the battles took place. It's very moving. Disgusting little island, though. Still an active volcano. Stinks of sulfur. There are dead Japanese everywhere under that island. It's icky. But I knew I would never have another chance to go, so I took the job.

It's better to spend money like there's no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there's no money.

Nothing about economic growth in the United States over the course of the past 40, 50 years, during which time this has been continually happening, would indicate that we are being harmed in an overall sense by this.

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

There are no kinder or better people in the world than those who listen to you when you are 18.

Thanksgiving is so called because we are all so thankful that it only comes once a year.

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.