Finally, one night we were smoking pot [with Michael O'Donoghue] and talking about the people that are invariably in high school, whether you go to prep school or public school or ghetto school or rich suburban school. And actually, it spun off from a Kurt Vonnegut quote.
P. J. O'RourkeAmerica wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
P. J. O'RourkeIf Disney still wants to make Epcot Center futuristic, they could do so by blowing the place up with an atom bomb.
P. J. O'RourkeHarvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage industry.
P. J. O'RourkeOne of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.
P. J. O'RourkeI have three children and three dogs. You put them in a Prius, you know? People who have a Prius obviously have no life! No wife, no kids, no pets - there's no room in there for anything!
P. J. O'RourkeThe old woman was not only ugly with the ugliness age brings us all but showed signs of formidable ugliness by birth - pickle-jar chin, mainsail ears and a nose like a trigonometry problem. What's more, she had the deep frown and snit wrinkles that come from a lifetime of bad character.
P. J. O'RourkeThe body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can't do, shouldn't do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.
P. J. O'RourkeThere was also a hunger strike in front of the National Press Club, which seemed an odd place to have a hunger strike (a cocktail fast, maybe). Although the Bangladeshis were savvy enough to know to know that if you're going to pester journalists, don't go to where they work: You'll never find them there.
P. J. O'RourkeRich parents are famous both for miserliness and astonishing longevity. And, when they finally do die, you'll find they've left their estate in inviolate trust to the golden retrievers.
P. J. O'RourkeWhen I left the Lampoon, I went west to try that out, and discovered that I hated it.They were awful people turning out awful product .
P. J. O'RourkeHunter S. Thompson brings a lunatic genius to ordinary events, and I bring an ordinary sensibility to lunatic events.
P. J. O'RourkeI'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.
P. J. O'RourkeIn case we have to shoot Democrats. It happened during the Civil War, and it could happen again.
P. J. O'RourkeViolence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.
P. J. O'RourkeI had grown up as a feature writer, and basically my career had been in The National Lampoon and as a magazine editor, and I'd never been a reporter.
P. J. O'RourkeThen there's politics. Just imagine politics with its dumbbell element subtracted. There would be no Republican candidates. There would be no Democratic voters. The whole system would collapse.
P. J. O'RourkeSmoking cigarettes seems to alarm peace activists much more than voting for Reagan does.
P. J. O'RourkeSumming it Up..."Where's a good place for dinner?" I asked. "There's the Brasserie Lipp on the Avenue St. Germaine," she said, "or La Coupole in Montmartre." "Not La Coupole," I said. "I've been there before. That's the place that's crowded and noisy and smells bad and everybody's rude as hell, isn't it?" "I think you just described France," she said.
P. J. O'RourkePolitics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty - their power and privilege - to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians.
P. J. O'RourkeAny random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.
P. J. O'RourkeThere is that kind of happiness. 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.
P. J. O'RourkeFinland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.
P. J. O'RourkeI have a 10 year old at home, and she is always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says that, I say, "Honey, you're cute; that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off; that's not fair. You were born in America; that's not fair. Honey, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you.
P. J. O'RourkeA good bachelor drinks his dessert (and sometimes the rest of his meals). A sweet tooth is a danger signal that you're getting too much exercise and not enough cocktails.
P. J. O'RourkeName me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you've half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're doing a hundred miles an hour in a suburban side street.
P. J. O'RourkeImagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And - since women are a majority of the population - we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.
P. J. O'RourkeI have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.
P. J. O'RourkeI live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I've got beachfront property. You tell us up there, "By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater," and we say, "Your point is?"
P. J. O'RourkeBecause of their cuisine, Germans don't consider farting rude. They'd certainly be out of luck if they did.
P. J. O'RourkeThere's a very good reason that governments aren't supposed to compete with private-enterprise companies. Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.
P. J. O'Rourke[Kurt] Vonnegut once said, if you ever want to know who somebody is... Like you look at Richard Nixon, or Adolf Hitler, or Ralph Nader, or anybody who seems like a difficult person to understand, and is therefore not part of the pattern of human behavior. Think about who they were in high school, and they will explain themselves to you. So we got a hold of, like, 50 high-school yearbooks, including my mom's from 1925 or something, and we discovered that they're all the same.
P. J. O'RourkeWell the planet I've got a chance to visit is Earth, and Earth's principal features are chaos and war. I think I'd be a fool to spend years here and never have a look.
P. J. O'RourkeYou don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.
P. J. O'RourkePoliticians are wonderful people as longa as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.
P. J. O'Rourke