P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

I'm 61 years old. I'm not that fearful of the future, period. I'm not going to see that much of it.

Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.

If I do, I say so. That's the only way out of that. If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words "I don't know." I mean, there are certain basic principles, like the dignity of the individual and the individual's responsibility, and certain basic economic principles, like how when something costs less, more of it will be consumed... There are certain things that I feel pretty confident about.

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.

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.

The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to collectivists, to people who believe that wealth is best obtained by redistribution, and that message is clear and concise . . . Egalitarianism is sinful; it's also cowardly.

Anyhow, all mankind's ideas and interests, all human aims and motives, are exhibited, fully formed, in a three-year-old child. The kid is just operating on a smaller scale and lacks the advantage of having made enormous soft-money campaign contributions to political candidates.

I'm a rather decisive type.

It is important to remember when making jokes about women, that they are not a minority. They weren't captured on another continent and brought here in leg-irons (funny shoes, yes, but not leg-irons) and Hitler didn't blame them for Germany's loss in WWI. Therefore, you can make any kind of fun of them you want.

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.

Nothing bad is going to happen to us. If we get fired, it's not failure; its a midlife vocational reassessment.

Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation's capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.

We're gonna be in a world of hurt if we don't get it fixed, because there's going to be billions of people out there - they're hungry, they're mad. One thing that they can get their hands on is guns.

The typical old-fashioned diet (in the nineteenth century) was so bad it almost assembled modern dieting.

I started reading Hunter S. Thompson when I was in college.

Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer.

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.

I'm certainly not fearful.

A pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. 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.

The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them to be responsible on the various adventures they have on their way to those goals, good, bad, and otherwise.

Liberals have a quaint and touching faith that truth is on their side and an even quainter faith that journalists are on the side of truth.

Guns are always the best method for a private suicide. They are more stylish looking than single-edged razor blades and natural gas has got so expensive. Drugs are too chancy. You might miscalculate the dosage and just have a good time.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

Christmas begins about the first of December with an office party and ends when you finally realize what you spent, around April fifteenth of the next year.

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.

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.

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'.

It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things.

Apparently Bolivia is the key source of lithium in the world. So we're gonna trade the Saudis for the Bolivians.

Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.

If you get outside the world of show business and its satellites, there's a whole world of car nuts in the Los Angeles area.

Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.

Now majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But like other precious, sacred things .... it's not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza.

Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.

I didn't see any NRA officials killing babies in Waco.

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?

Mercedes Benz : A mechanical device that increases sexual arousal in women.

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?

Dating is the social engagement with the threat of sex at its conclusion.

There aren't many political humorists. Dave Barry is excellent, but he doesn't do it much.

In Japan people drive on the left. In China people drive on the right. In Vietnam it doesn't matter.

If we're free to do what we want, why does government always have a plan for us?

People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.

I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.

That doesn't mean that you should just sit back and just let accidents happen to you. No, you have to go out and cause them yourself. That way you're in control of the situation.

Sometimes you need a B-2 bomber and sometimes you need your mother.

There are lots of levels of fear and complaint about the government getting involved in business. First and foremost, of course, is incompetence.

That happy sense of purpose people have when standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet.