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Quotes by 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
After all, what is your host's purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
– P. J. O'Rourke
America 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'Rourke
Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
– 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
Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
– P. J. O'Rourke
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.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren't present.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
– 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
I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a learning experience. Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a learning experience. It makes me feel less stupid.
– P. J. O'Rourke
I suppose I should get a VCR, but the only thing I like about television is its ephemerality.
– P. J. O'Rourke
If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
– 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
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
In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.
– 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
Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?
– P. J. O'Rourke
Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
– P. J. O'Rourke
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.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
– 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
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
The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?
– P. J. O'Rourke
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
– P. J. O'Rourke
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.
– P. J. O'Rourke
The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
– P. J. O'Rourke
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
– 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's one more terrifying fact about old people: I'm going to be one soon.
– 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
Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
– P. J. O'Rourke
You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
– P. J. O'Rourke
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Skiing consists of wearing $3,000 worth of clothes and equipment and driving 200 miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and drink.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen.
– 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
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
– 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
We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
– P. J. O'Rourke
There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.
– P. J. O'Rourke
There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
– P. J. O'Rourke
There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is - certainly is one of them. But it's low on my list.
– P. J. O'Rourke
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
– P. J. O'Rourke
The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them to be responsible on the various adventures they have on their way to those goals, good, bad, and otherwise.
– 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
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
The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Satire doesn't effect change.
– P. J. O'Rourke
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.
– P. J. O'Rourke
People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.
– P. J. O'Rourke
People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.
– 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
Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.
– P. J. O'Rourke
No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Never fight an inanimate object.
– P. J. O'Rourke
My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you're fortunate - and both of us are - you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
– P. J. O'Rourke
I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.
– P. J. O'Rourke
I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.
– 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
I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.
– P. J. O'Rourke
As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.
– P. J. O'Rourke
All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.
– P. J. O'Rourke