P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

I'll pick "I'm kidding" anytime over "I'm lying."

For toddlers I suggest leaving their mittens on year-round, indoors and out. That way they can't get into aspirin bottles, liquor cabinets, or boxes of kitchen matches.

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.

Once we realized that there were these 25 invariable types - the class politician, the frigid popular girl, the kid who tags along behind the jocks - once we came up with these key characters in a cloud of marijuana, the whole thing just came together. One of the things I'm really proud of is how much of a high-school yearbook it is in its look, so much so that Hunter Publishing had the art director, David Kaestle, and I come for years to their annual convention and do a little talk on how not to do a yearbook.

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.

This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans.

The motorcycle is a device created by the team of God and Darwin to rid the world of useless young males.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Masochists are people that have pleasure confused with pain. In a world that has television confused with entertainment, doritoes confused with food, and Dan Quayle confused with a national political leader, masochists are clearly less mixed-up than the rest of us.

African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.

Fashionably amusing table manners are a matter of breaking the right rule at the right time.

Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen. "Get shot! Get killed! Get diseases from foreign women who despise you in their hearts!"

Any trade that is voluntarily made is mutually beneficial, by definition, and, indeed, is balanced, by definition.

As a result of that, and as a result of friendship, I don't think we've ever been competitive. I mean, there's probably a very good reason Hunter [S. Thompson] isn't jealous of me.

Michael O'Donoghue was a very close friend of mine - very encouraging with my stuff, and really a great guy - but he was a no-kidding difficult person.

Oh, God. The Sixties are coming back. Well I've got a 12-gauge double-barreled duck gun chambered for three-inch Magnum shells. And - speaking strictly for this retired hippie and former pinko beatnik - if the Sixties head my way, they won't get past the porch steps. They will be history. Which, for chrissakes, is what they're supposed to be.

I'm not guaranteeing what we come up with will be better for the planet. There is ethanol, for instance, which actually nets out with more pollution at greater expense, and more harm to the environment than petroleum, but we'll come up with something.

The real alternative to power of the rich is not power of the poor. It's just plain power.

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.

Lampoon was exactly the opposite. The work was a lot of fun, but the office environment was hell. You cannot put 20 humorists together.

Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.

Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste and style mixed together so that you don't need any of those things.

The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.

Dates used to be made days or even weeks in advance. Now dates tend to be made the day after. That is, you get a phone call from someone who says, "If anyone asks, I was out to dinner with you last night, okay?"

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.

At Epcot Center the Disney corporation has focused its attention on two things greatly in need of Disneyfication: the tedious future and the annoying whole wide world.

There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable. They still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.

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.

If the wind is blowing like stink and everything is working right, a twelve-meter sailboat can go eleven and a half or twelve miles an hour, the same speed at which a bond lawyer runs around the Cental Park Reservoir.

Some jobs are worse than actual wives. Ad agency vs. Matrimony, for instance: Even the most capricious and demanding spouse is not going to divorce you for refusing to spend forty hours a week making up lies about toilet paper.

I had really not been out of the United States much, except for Mexico. I thought, "Jesus Christ, this [Russia] is like a whole new world." Instead of writing Michael Jackson one-glove jokes, all I had to do was go to these weird places and keep my eyes and ears open.

It is 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. In fact, cats possess so many of the same qualities as people that it is often hard to tell the people and the cats apart.

I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.

The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn't occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn't go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.

Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.

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 get 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.

The Russians could have some (warheads) aimed at Japan, so if we act up they can destroy our economy.

I am a great admirer of women.

I went back to bumming around New York, writing freelance stuff for Car & Driver and such.

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.

You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.

Pollution is a problem, and there's the whole problem of the spoiling of the commons, but we've addressed the pollution problem on a variety of different levels in a variety of ways, and it's worked pretty well.

Politics should be limited in scope to ware, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class.

Like Rick in Casablanca: "We'll always have Paris." When what we'll always have is, like, Brooklyn and arguments about [Lev] Trotsky.

Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.

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.