P. J. O'Rourke Quotes & Sayings

Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world. — P. J. O'Rourke

The good thing about SUVs is they have storage. — P. J. O'Rourke

You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can. — P. J. O'Rourke

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken. — P. J. O'Rourke

If we were to inspect ourselves or members of our family and our friends, we would see that we don't really have to go all the way overseas to be mystified - we can be mystified right at home. — P. J. O'Rourke

Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros. — P. J. O'Rourke

Whenever people tell you they are going to wipe the slate clean, it's your slate they mean to wipe. — P. J. O'Rourke

When someone detonates a suicide bomb, that person does not have career prospects. — P. J. O'Rourke

New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State's registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they're going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can't understand what they say. — P. J. O'Rourke

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. — P. J. O'Rourke

There are a number of Americans who shouldn't vote. The number is 57 percent, to judge by the combined total of Clinton and Perot ballots in the 1996 presidential election. — P. J. O'Rourke

The world is going to hell. All we can do is look good on the trip. — P. J. O'Rourke

If you spend seventy-two hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. — P. J. O'Rourke

Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization. — P. J. O'Rourke

The Theory of Surplus Value means that anytime you hire someone, you are exploiting him. If you pay someone to fix your automobile, he has the right, by virtue of being your mechanic, to steal your car. — P. J. O'Rourke

Never fight an inanimate object. — P. J. O'Rourke

The Vietnamese Hoa were merchants and manufacturers. They were very successful and thus, according to the logic of Marxism, responsible for society's failures. The Hoa suffered the same fate as the pizza parlour in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing except at the hands of the world's fourth largest army instead of a small, petulant movie director. — P. J. O'Rourke

War will exist as long as there's a food chain. — P. J. O'Rourke

Vegetables are something God invented to let women get even with their children. — P. J. O'Rourke

Earnestness is stupidity sent to college. — P. J. O'Rourke

Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir. — P. J. O'Rourke

Happy hour is slightly different in the Soviet Union. There are no ice cubes or orange-peel twists in the vodka. Also, it lasts all day. — P. J. O'Rourke

You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does. — P. J. O'Rourke

Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please. — P. J. O'Rourke

If we do our deficit spending on weapons, at least we get weapons. Then if we need weapons, we have them. If we don't need them, no harm is done. — P. J. O'Rourke

There's a joke people tell in the Soviet Union: Mitterrand, Bush and Gorbachev have a meeting with God. Mitterrand says, 'My country faces many difficult problems-- lagging exports, Muslim minorities, European unification. How long will it be before France's problems are solved?' God says, 'Fifteen years.' Mitterrand begins to cry. 'I'm an old man,' says Mitterrand. 'I'll be dead by then. I'll never see France's problems solved.' Then Bush says, 'My country faces many difficult problems-- recession, crime, racial prejudice. How long will it be before America's problems are solved?' God says, 'Ten years.' Bush begins to cry. 'I'm an old man,' says Bush. 'I'll be out of office by then. I won't get any credit for solving America's problems.' Then Gorbachev says, 'My country faces many, many difficult problems. How long will it be before the Soviet Union's problems are solved?' God begins to cry. — P. J. O'Rourke

I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now. — P. J. O'Rourke

The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind. — P. J. O'Rourke

A woman should dress to attract attention. To attract the most attention, a woman should be either nude, or wearing something as expensive as getting her nude is going to be. — P. J. O'Rourke

There's nothing more oily and cynical in politics than telling the truth. — P. J. O'Rourke

I have never Twittered or Tweeted or even Chirped. — P. J. O'Rourke

The Middle Eastern states aren't nations; they're quarrels with borders. — P. J. O'Rourke

Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician. — P. J. O'Rourke

The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and health and retirement benefits working on the General Livestock Corporation assembly line putting udders on cows. — P. J. O'Rourke

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks. — P. J. O'Rourke

If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked. — P. J. O'Rourke

Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free - indeed, sanctimonious - way for progressives to be racists. — P. J. O'Rourke

The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie, you're the Scary Dad. Never mind that no one has had an actually scary dad since 1966. The visceral fear remains. — P. J. O'Rourke

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail. — P. J. O'Rourke

Cars let us out of the barn and, while they were at it, destroyed the American nuclear family. As anyone who has had an American nuclear family can tell you, this was a relief to all concerned. — P. J. O'Rourke

The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the '70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war. — P. J. O'Rourke

Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate. — P. J. O'Rourke

The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out. — P. J. O'Rourke

There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with raw egg yolks and cottage cheese in them. — P. J. O'Rourke

Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware. — P. J. O'Rourke

I don't even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I've never used a computer. — P. J. O'Rourke

If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat - in other words, turn you into an adult. — P. J. O'Rourke

Maybe the real secret to America's greatness is that we hate one another. — P. J. O'Rourke

Inside every Sancho Panza there's a Don Quixote struggling to get out. — P. J. O'Rourke

The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. — P. J. O'Rourke

Those who do not know history are probably also not doing well in English or math. P.J. O'Rourke — P. J. O'Rourke

As murderous industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald's. — P. J. O'Rourke

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

Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave. — P. J. O'Rourke

The great apologist has to have lived large and wild. If he's going to kiss the world's boo-boos and make up, he'd better plant some bruises first. A master apologizer has to be a Lord Byron, a Rick in Casablanca, a Lee Atwater, anyway. — P. J. O'Rourke

To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze. — P. J. O'Rourke

Jimmy Carter was - he still - he remains to this day America's most ex of ex-presidents. You just can't believe that we elected this doofus. He was a bright enough guy and sort of well-meaning. But he was about as prepared to be president of the United States as your goofy old uncle, you know, the one that memorises baseball statistics. — P. J. O'Rourke

Fortunately, I'm married to someone who's a pretty excellent parent! — P. J. O'Rourke

Most of us had never seen a sober redneck before, and we have the Reagan Landslide to testify that none of us ever wants to see one again. It was a horrifying apparition. And ever since Jimmy Carter, all of us rednecks have had to be very careful to be drunk rednecks lest we turn into some kind of awful creature with big buck teeth and a State Department full of human-rights yahoos. — P. J. O'Rourke

Political leaders are expert at saying nothing. — P. J. O'Rourke

Detroit is beautiful - though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it. — P. J. O'Rourke

The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry - knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission. — P. J. O'Rourke

So what if I don't agree with the Democrats? What's to disagree with? They believe everything. And what they don't believe, the Republicans do. Neither of them stands for anything they believe in, anyway. — P. J. O'Rourke

Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less. — P. J. O'Rourke

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. — P. J. O'Rourke

TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence. — P. J. O'Rourke

People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it's the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation. — P. J. O'Rourke

Political systems must love poverty-they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. And politicians in democracies benefit from destitution, too. The US has had a broad range of poverty programs for 30 years. Those programs have failed. Millions of people are still poor. And those people vote for politicians who favor keeping the poverty programs in place. There's a conspiracy theory in there somewhere. — P. J. O'Rourke

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.' — P. J. O'Rourke

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren't there. — P. J. O'Rourke

Smoking is very bad for you and should only be done because it looks so good. People who don't smoke have a terrible time finding something polite to do with their lips. — P. J. O'Rourke

Democrats hate success. — P. J. O'Rourke

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. — P. J. O'Rourke

If you want to join the Republican party, they have to let you in. There's nothing they can do about it. I mean, if Republicans will take Al D'Amato, they'll take anybody. — P. J. O'Rourke

I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I'm not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses. — P. J. O'Rourke

Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance. — P. J. O'Rourke

I don't watch much television. — P. J. O'Rourke

The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborgini to the Gran Prix track to watch the charter buses race. — P. J. O'Rourke

Are you a Democrat because you're a union member? Then why, after eight years of Bill Clinton, does some Chinese guy in Guangdong province have your job? — P. J. O'Rourke

If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free. — P. J. O'Rourke

Moviemakers are rewarded with tax write-offs if, when seeking a location that looks like America, they seek it in America. — P. J. O'Rourke

If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography. — P. J. O'Rourke

Men generally pay for all expenses on a date ... either sex, however, may bring a little gift, its value to be determined by the bizarrness of the sexual request to be made later that evening. — P. J. O'Rourke

We got over feminism, too. At least women did, as soon as they were hired for those high-prestige jobs that only men used to have. It turns out that work sucks. — P. J. O'Rourke

The Greenpeace booth at all the rock and roll shows nowadays are akin to the old sorcerers who used to stand in the middle of villages warning of danger, 'When night wolf swallows mother moon, there will be great famine.' — P. J. O'Rourke

People shouldn't be treated like objects. They aren't that valuable. — P. J. O'Rourke

Politicians will talk strategy and tactics and policies and programs until they're blue in the face, or you strangle them and they turn blue. — P. J. O'Rourke

One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere. I strongly support paper recycling. — P. J. O'Rourke

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race — P. J. O'Rourke

Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market. — P. J. O'Rourke

Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall gin-and-tonic is the way to save the planet. — P. J. O'Rourke

The only time a bachelor's bed is made is when it's in the factory. — P. J. O'Rourke

Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones. — P. J. O'Rourke

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?" — P. J. O'Rourke

We all know the types who listen to Pete Seeger songs; even Pete admits they aren't interesting. — P. J. O'Rourke

Stupid is a great force in human affairs. — P. J. O'Rourke

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. — P. J. O'Rourke

The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say. — P. J. O'Rourke

I don't understand anything about America's culture. — P. J. O'Rourke

Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot. — P. J. O'Rourke