J O'rourke Quotes & Sayings

I'm fascinated by political enthusiasm. — P. J. O'Rourke

Children from the age of five to ten should watch more television. Television depicts adults as rotten SOB's given to fistfights, gunplay, and other mayhem. Kids who believe this about grownups aren't likely to argue about bedtime. — P. J. O'Rourke

It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). And this is not just a Somali problem. We have poverty and deprivation in our own country. Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last. — P. J. O'Rourke

Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay your taxes, you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot ... Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, 'Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?' — P. J. O'Rourke

The preamble to the Constitution states: "We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare ... " It doesn't say "guarantee the general welfare." And it certainly doesn't say "give welfare benefits to all the people in the country who aren't doing so well even if the reason they aren't doing so well is because they're sitting on their butts in front of the TV". — P. J. O'Rourke

We are a nation that worships speed and power. And for good reason. Without power we would still be part of England and everybody would be out of work ... Bicycles are too slow and impuissant for a nation like ours. They belong in Czechoslovakia. — P. J. O'Rourke

Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples. — P. J. O'Rourke

What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt. — P. J. O'Rourke

Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won't dig up the pretty lawn, won't plant anything for fear of getting dirty, and they use fragrant bath salts from The Body Shop instead of smelly compost. — P. J. O'Rourke

Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich. — P. J. O'Rourke

El Salvador has the scenery of northern California and the climate of southern California plus - and this was a relief - no Californians. — P. J. O'Rourke

One 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'Rourke

Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box. — 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

President Clinton commenced the blathering with orotund — P. J. O'Rourke

As author P. J. O'Rourke puts it: Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it's cute but boring and expensive. — Timothy Ferriss

This country was founded by religious nuts with guns. — P. J. O'Rourke

A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too. — P. J. O'Rourke

I live in rural New Hampshire, and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we're short on people. My town has a population of 301. — P. J. O'Rourke

No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism. — P. J. O'Rourke

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. — P. J. O'Rourke

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

The people who despise America are the editors of the 'New Statesman.' Their green-card applications must have been turned down. — P. J. O'Rourke

The question nowadays is not what makes government work. The question is how do we make it stop. — P. J. O'Rourke

The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things - war and hunger and date rape - liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things ... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal. — P. J. O'Rourke

To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage Weltscbmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt? — P. J. O'Rourke

I like to argue with the radio. — 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

Democrats hate Democrats most of all. — P. J. O'Rourke

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. — P. J. O'Rourke

Politics is the art of achieving prestige and power without merit. — P. J. O'Rourke

The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they're living. — P. J. O'Rourke

There are no kinder or better people in the world than those who listen to you when you are 18. — P. J. O'Rourke

Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer
a noisy but small and useless part of the national household. — P. J. O'Rourke

The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids. — P. J. O'Rourke

Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude. — P. J. O'Rourke

I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after. — P. J. O'Rourke

President Obama has contempt for real money. — P. J. O'Rourke

What's important about morality in politics is us. We own the chicken farm. We must give our bird-brained, feather-headed politicians morals. Politicians love to think of themselves as "free-range" but they do not have the capacity to hunt or gather morals in the wild. If we fail to supply them with morality, politicians begin to act very scary in the barnyard. These are enormous headless chickens and they have nukes. — P. J. O'Rourke

The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society's ills can be cured politically. It's like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried. — P. J. O'Rourke

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

A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers. — P. J. O'Rourke

Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats. — P. J. O'Rourke

Liberal" is one of those fine English words, like "lady" "gay" or "welfare" that have been spoiled by special pleading. So by "liberal I certainly don't mean tolerant or open-handed people or even big-government Democrats. I mean anyone who is excited that 1% of Ben and Jerry's profits go to promote world peace. — P. J. O'Rourke

Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-'60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate. — P. J. O'Rourke

Taxi drivers all over the world, by the way, are under Newspaper Guild contract to give easy quotes to foreign correspondents. — 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

Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself. — P. J. O'Rourke

Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope. — P. J. O'Rourke

Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you're handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it's over. — P. J. O'Rourke

I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh; therefore I usually don't listen to him. — P. J. O'Rourke

Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed. — P. J. O'Rourke

Commies love concrete. — P. J. O'Rourke

My whole family can talk. They are all car salesmen. They are all funny. — 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

Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about "character issues." — P. J. O'Rourke

Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another. — P. J. O'Rourke

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. — P. J. O'Rourke

Gosh, was I wrong. Never listen to a pundit. Is there such a thing as "magnetic back-assward"? We pundits and commentators have had our compass needles pointed in that direction for the past eighteen months. Want a stock tip? I would — P. J. O'Rourke

Ending wars is very simple if you surrender. — P. J. O'Rourke

If you spend 72 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. Either that or you're President Obama. — P. J. O'Rourke

My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow ... he wasn't evil or anything, but he was worthless. — P. J. O'Rourke

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. — P. J. O'Rourke

There 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'Rourke

This is the most elaborate and luxurious method of convincing others that you can cook. Take everybody out on your yacht until they're green in the face. Then you can rave for weeks about your sauce marinara and no one will gainsay you.. — P. J. O'Rourke

I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry. — P. J. O'Rourke

Never strike anyone so old, small or weak that verbal abuse would have sufficed. — P. J. O'Rourke

Ann Coulter to me is someone who says things that I say all the time, but I say them at three in the morning when I'm drunk as a monkey. She says them at three in the afternoon stone sober in bright daylight. — P. J. O'Rourke

I've been a New Yorker for ten years, and the only people who are nice to us turn out to be Moonies. — P. J. O'Rourke

If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I'd claim it was forced on our country by a sinister international organization. — P. J. O'Rourke

The Constitution is an equally forthright piece of work and quite succinct ... giving the complete operating instructions for a nation of 250 million people. The manual for a Toyota Camry, which only seats five, is four times as long. — P. J. O'Rourke

Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since. — P. J. O'Rourke

Actually, there is no way of making vomiting courteous. You have to do the next best thing, which is to vomit in such a way that the story you tell about it later will be amusing. — P. J. O'Rourke

There's one more terrifying fact about old people: I'm going to be one soon. — P. J. O'Rourke

Wealth makes materialism easier to bear. — 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

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

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

Humor is a terrific tool for explaining things, especially when what you're explaining is frightening or dull and complicated. — P. J. O'Rourke

I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked. — P. J. O'Rourke

The main reason to be opposed to political control of smoking is to keep power -even the smallest and silliest kind of power - out of the hands of ... members of a dangerous class -the class that knows what's good for us better than we do. — P. J. O'Rourke

What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I've received a spam text. — P. J. O'Rourke

The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen. — P. J. O'Rourke

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? — P. J. O'Rourke

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively. — P. J. O'Rourke

What use is it to endure the Dutch Rubs and Indian Rope Burns that are politics if you can't obtain mastery over people and give them noogies back? — P. J. O'Rourke

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money. — P. J. O'Rourke

What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention. — P. J. O'Rourke

I've got a 1990 Porsche 911. It's just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it. — P. J. O'Rourke

Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about. — P. J. O'Rourke

If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed. — P. J. O'Rourke

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices. — P. J. O'Rourke

I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it. — P. J. O'Rourke

You can't get good chinese takeout in China and cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism. — P. J. O'Rourke

Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the liberal elite. And we can't blame taxpayers for being reluctant to subsidize the reportorial careers of J-school twerps who should have joined the Peace Corps and gone to Africa to 'speak truth to power' to Robert Mugabe. — P. J. O'Rourke

Germans respond well to lies. At least, they always have historically. — P. J. O'Rourke

America is the world's policeman, all right
a big, dumb, mick flatfoot in the middle of the one thing cops dread most, a domestic disturbance. — P. J. O'Rourke

Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same. — P. J. O'Rourke

Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce. — P. J. O'Rourke