P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.

Never fight an inanimate object.

We had a choice between Democrats who couldn't learn from the past and Republicans who couldn't stop living in it.

Journalists aren't supposed to praise things. It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something.

Remember, your body needs 6 to 8 glasses of fluid daily. Straight up or on the rocks.

Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.

You can smoke or drink on a golf course without interrupting the game, and you can take a leak - something you can't do on a squash court and shouldn't do in a swimming pool.

Money is preferable to politics. It is the difference between being free to be anybody you want and to vote for anybody you want. And money is more effective than politics both in solving problems and in providing individual independence. To rid ourselves of all the trouble in the world, we need to make money. And to make money, we need to be free.

The average IQ in America is—and this can be proven mathematically—average.

Never wear anything that panics the cat.

Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.

[Wave of bestselling conservative commentators] it's kind of like reading The Power Of Positive Thinking, or any other advice or how-to book. All they do is reassure people of their basic opinions, and then they can continue to act like they've always acted. I'd say it's time to move on to something else, but I don't know what it would be.

Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.

Journalists are notoriously easy to kid. All you have to do is speak to a journalist in a very serious tone of voice, and he will be certain that you are either telling the truth or a big, important lie.

Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.

I covered the Lebanese civil war. I could see a place that had once been prosperous and now was impoverished. I'm not seeing that in America.

Then there was communism's weak-tea sister, socialism. Socialists maintained that we shouldn't take all the money away from all the people since all the people don't have money. We should take all the money away from only the people who make money. Then, when we run out of that, we could take more money from the people who...hey, wait! Where'd you people go? What do you mean you're "tax exiles in Monaco?"

To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

Imagine having journalists in your own home and not even covering the furniture with plastic sheets first.

One thing talk can't accomplish is communication. This is because everybody's talking too much to pay attention to what anyone is saying

The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say.

Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.

People have a right to my food, a right to my housing, and a right to my good job for my decent pay.

Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.

The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German. For this, and several other reasons, Germany is known as 'the land where Israelis learned their manners'.

Wealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued. But liberals aren't very interested in such real and material freedoms. They have a more innocent - not to say toddlerlike - idea of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums.

The collegiate idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.

...let's talk about soccer scores. There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency and scoreless sports ties are boring.

From National Lampoon, you go directly to Saturday Night Live, because it's a lot of the same people.

[ I'm] humorist, I guess. Or really more of a reporter. A reporter who reports on funny things.

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

The poor of the world cannot be made rich by the redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape.

Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Gluttony, or, as we call them these days, "getting in touch with your sexuality," "raising your self-esteem," "relaxation therapy," and "being a recovered bulimic."

The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.

We like to pile language on language. Hunter [ S. Thompson] was an influence on me, no doubt about it.

The Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.

Especially with a magazine like Lampoon, which was very dependent on newsstand sales. Our readers didn't usually occupy the same address long enough to get a subscription, because they were in college, or they were hippies. So it was very up-and-down, and we had to calculate how many to print, which was always sort of a headache from a business point of view.

Detroits industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

I'll be 56 this year, I've got two kids, and I think it's probably time to go back to writing one-glove jokes.

You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.

It's the squares who know how to fly the fighter planes and operate the missiles and the bombs and work the M-16s. Liberals would still be fumbling with the federally mandated trigger locks.

The day was warm and clear. Kids were playing soccer in the parking lots and women were sunning their babies and having their tea all over the lawns. The scene was entirely too cheery for journalism.

In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word : Dentistry.

Normally, the job sucks but work is kinda fun, because you see your friends and flirt with girls and stuff.

Bill Maher can be pretty good, except when he gets "important." Maher's all over the place politically.

Even a band of angels can turn ugly and start looting if enough angels are unemployed and hanging around the Pearly Gates convinced that all the succubi own all the liquor stores in Heaven.

Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.