I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now. You've probably never woken up early on a winter morning to the acid stink of coal smoke in the air, which was everywhere when I was a little kid. My grade school was heated with coal. Not only was coal used to generate electricity, it was without any scrubbers in the stacks.
P. J. O'RourkeHow much fame, money and power does a woman have to achieve on her own before you can punch her in the face?
P. J. O'RourkeIn the American political system, you're only allowed to have real ideas if it's absolutely guaranteed that you can't win an election
P. J. O'RourkeStay away from girls who cry a lot or who look like they get pregnant easily or have careers.
P. J. O'RourkeA world government run by the UN will be like getting an old, purblind, half-deaf substitute teacher.
P. J. O'RourkeHealth care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting a high-powered coporate 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'RourkeTo 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 Weltscbmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?
P. J. O'RourkeFiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.
P. J. O'RourkeWe should never hesitate to listen to a fool about life because life is pretty foolish as far as I can tell.
P. J. O'RourkeThe 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'RourkeGambling is so pervasive in Nevada that maybe the state should just go the whole hog. There'd be gum machines that dispensed chewing tobacco if you lost. You could gamble for the toilet paper in public bathroom stalls. And fill out Keno cards in an attempt to win cancer therapy at the hospital.
P. J. O'RourkeThe Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns'n'Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance brokerin America who owns a pair of white shoes.
P. J. O'RourkeThe 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'RourkeThere's something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.
P. J. O'RourkeWho, other than a crazy person, does anything besides hang up on a robo-call? Any call, any person, anywhere, under any circumstances.
P. J. O'RourkeGenerally it's not a good idea to wear Banana Republic - type khaki journalist clothes in a war zone. You might look too much like something that's supposed to be shot, such as a journalist.
P. J. O'RourkeThe 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'RourkeAbstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.
P. J. O'RourkeMaybe 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."
P. J. O'RourkeGovernment usually doesn't work. It doesn't work because it is political. People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs. The difference between the political process and an honest life is the difference between parading around waving picket signs while hollering catcalls in front of the White House and getting up in the morning to go make a living.
P. J. O'RourkeActually, there is no way of making vomiting courteous. You have to do the next best thing, which is to vomit in such a way that the story you tell about it later will be amusing.
P. J. O'RourkeMoscow 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'RourkeIt is important to remember when reading Adam Smith or even when just thinking about Smith that the era that he lived in, we're not talking about poverty in a day when it meant not enough bedrooms for the kids, an old car, a black and white television. We're talking about a whole world where poverty meant not enough to eat.
P. J. O'RourkeIn theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.
P. J. O'RourkeHow 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'RourkeAdam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.
P. J. O'RourkeRussian cars are silly. They look like imports drawn by a cartoonist for a UAW newsletter.
P. J. O'RourkeI was never in the office [of Rolling Stone]. It was very different from Lampoon, where we spent a lot of time together socially, which is to say "drunk."
P. J. O'RourkeIt is very hard now to shock people into thinking about government regulation and the extent of government involvement in life.
P. J. O'RourkeGood manners can replace morals. It may be years before anyone knows if what you are doing is right. But if what you are doing is nice, it will be immediately evident.
P. J. O'RourkeModern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.
P. J. O'RourkeSeriously. It was running out at Rolling Stone. First of all, they didn't feel the need for a dissident conservative voice in a world where certain conservative aspects had become intellectually dominant. I would actually argue against that, but on the surface of it, in the [Bill] Clinton years the market economy triumphed, certain libertarian ideas became ordinary, and certain early-20th-century ideas about centralization of government and economic planning and socialism with a small "s" had obviously gone out the window. The Cold War was over, blah blah blah.
P. J. O'RourkeThe America's Cup is like driving your Lamborgini to the Gran Prix track to watch the charter buses race.
P. J. O'RourkeThe number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. Being a Republican, I'm backing Hillary Clinton. Because she could lose. The reason is not that she's a woman. The reason is that she's the particular woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in. Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is "America's ex-wife."
P. J. O'RourkeI arrived in the middle of a press conference - as boring a thing to sit through if you don't know the language as it is if you do.
P. J. O'Rourke