Top 100 P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
#1. No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.
P. J. O'Rourke
#2. Anyhow, all mankind's ideas and interests, all human aims and motives, are exhibited, fully formed, in a three-year-old child. The kid is just operating on a smaller scale and lacks the advantage of having made enormous soft-money campaign contributions to political candidates.
P. J. O'Rourke
#3. 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
#4. What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians - whatever those motives may be - is that politicians must announce their motives as visionary and grand.
P. J. O'Rourke
#5. There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
P. J. O'Rourke
#6. Fortunately, I discovered journalism. Talent hasn't been a question since. But
P. J. O'Rourke
#7. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P. J. O'Rourke
#8. 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
#9. Never Refuse Wine. It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone who doesn't drink must be an alcoholic.
P. J. O'Rourke
#10. Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.
P. J. O'Rourke
#11. 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
#12. Affirmative action makes employers think, 'Black woman nuclear physicist? Hah! Probably let her into Harvard 'cause they were looking for a twofer. Bet she got C's in high school practical math. Give her a job in personnel.'
P. J. O'Rourke
#13. Walt is dead. And, after a couple of hours at Epcot, you'll wish you were, too.
P. J. O'Rourke
#14. Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.
P. J. O'Rourke
#15. 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
#16. Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since.
P. J. O'Rourke
#17. All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.
P. J. O'Rourke
#18. Whatever the occasion, do not neglect alcohol. No other refreshment will do. Yes, alcohol kills brain cells, but it's very selective. It only kills the brain cells that contain good sense, shame, embarrassment, and restraint.
P. J. O'Rourke
#19. If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas.
P. J. O'Rourke
#20. 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
#21. I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper.
P. J. O'Rourke
#22. Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
P. J. O'Rourke
#23. The Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns'n'Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance brokerin America who owns a pair of white shoes.
P. J. O'Rourke
#24. When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
P. J. O'Rourke
#25. Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
P. J. O'Rourke
#26. Never do anything to a clitoris with your teeth that you wouldn't do to an expensive waterproof wristwatch.
P. J. O'Rourke
#27. Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let's hope so.
P. J. O'Rourke
#28. Jesse Jackson was spending time with his family, or families.
P. J. O'Rourke
#29. . . . crop restrictions not only raise the price of corn and other crops but also tend to raise farmers' total revenues and earnings." Increase your corn profit by not growing corn? Here's a wonderful kind of business where everybody can get rich if they'll just do nothing.
P. J. O'Rourke
#30. 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
#32. Considering what a hot, wed dog smells like, dog stew has a surprisingly savory odor To tell the truth, it tastes pretty good, like oxtail. To be perfectly honest, it's delicious. (Anything about this to my golden retriever, and I'll punch your lights out.)
P. J. O'Rourke
#33. Everything on a boat has a different name than it would have if it weren't on a boat. Either this is ancient seafaring tradition or it's how people who mess around with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished college.
P. J. O'Rourke
#34. Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.
P. J. O'Rourke
#35. Dating is the social engagement with the threat of sex at its conclusion.
P. J. O'Rourke
#36. The Middle Eastern states aren't nations; they're quarrels with borders.
P. J. O'Rourke
#38. If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions.
P. J. O'Rourke
#39. Long conversations with pals when neither you nor they have had a drink can be a test of palship.
P. J. O'Rourke
#40. My whole family can talk. They are all car salesmen. They are all funny.
P. J. O'Rourke
#41. Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
P. J. O'Rourke
#42. During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?
P. J. O'Rourke
#43. 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
#44. Satan probably wouldn't have talked so big if God had been his wife.
P. J. O'Rourke
#45. Something that confirms all fears and many conspiracy theories about government is finding out what our elected representatives would put into law if they could.
P. J. O'Rourke
#46. Wearing a hat implies that you are bald if you are a man and that your hair is dirty if you are a woman.
P. J. O'Rourke
#47. I am a student of stupidity. I am a political reporter.
P. J. O'Rourke
#49. Demolishing pretensions, especially worthy ones, is a hallmark of the baby boom.
P. J. O'Rourke
#50. The Democrats said, "We don't know what's wrong with America, but we can fix it." The Republicans said, "There's nothing wrong with America, and we can fix that."
P. J. O'Rourke
#51. 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
#52. Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.
P. J. O'Rourke
#53. The world is going to hell. All we can do is look good on the trip.
P. J. O'Rourke
#54. 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
#55. Everybody in America who didn't come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.
P. J. O'Rourke
#56. 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
#57. West Germans are tall, pink, pert and orthodontically corrected, with hands, teeth and hair as clean as their clothes and clothes as sharp as their looks. Except for the fact that they all speak English pretty well, they're indistinguishable from Americans.
P. J. O'Rourke
#58. The job of the president of the United States is to talk to the public, is to explain to them. Now, some presidents talk too much, like Bill Clinton. Some presidents try to talk but don't know how, like George Bush senior.
P. J. O'Rourke
#59. The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.
P. J. O'Rourke
#60. 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
#61. Harvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage industry.
P. J. O'Rourke
#62. 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
#63. Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.
P. J. O'Rourke
#64. When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.
P. J. O'Rourke
#65. 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
#66. Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.
P. J. O'Rourke
#67. I've only been to New Zealand once, about 1989. It was incredibly beautiful, kind of like the ideal of where I live in New England - all that and then some - but I can't say I was there long enough to get any very clear idea.
P. J. O'Rourke
#68. Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
P. J. O'Rourke
#69. In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City.
P. J. O'Rourke
#70. There was an austerely dignified award ceremony. By that I mean we had to buy our own drinks - in clear violation of the international journalists'code of truth, fairness and an open bar.
P. J. O'Rourke
#72. Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.
P. J. O'Rourke
#73. There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
P. J. O'Rourke
#74. Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.
P. J. O'Rourke
#75. Sucking the fun out of life has always been an important component of politics.
P. J. O'Rourke
#76. They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, 'But doesn't it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn't it be set in New Guinea?' And you say, 'But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.'
P. J. O'Rourke
#77. I'm here as a radio journalist but am not even sure which part of a tape recorder takes the pictures.
P. J. O'Rourke
#78. With Epcot Center, the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of make-believe that's worse than regular life.
P. J. O'Rourke
#79. Greatest generation came through some stuff that we can't even imagine - the Depression, World War I - and all they wanted after that was a breather and a calm and a quiet life, and they get us.
P. J. O'Rourke
#80. Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.
P. J. O'Rourke
#81. 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
#82. Americans appreciate bad taste or America wouldn't look the way America does.
P. J. O'Rourke
#84. You're never going to read 'The Wealth of Nations,' and you shouldn't, really. It's 900 pages.
P. J. O'Rourke
#85. 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
#86. I blame feminism and Facebook for the death of the American automobile. I'm a Republican, so I blame everything on feminism - or commies.
P. J. O'Rourke
#87. I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.
P. J. O'Rourke
#88. America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being 'hegemonistic', of engaging in 'unilateralism', of behaving as if we're the only nation on earth that counts. We are.
P. J. O'Rourke
#89. The French are sawed-off sissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese that smells like people's feet. Utter cowards who force their own children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons even when you try to speak to them in their own wimpy language.
P. J. O'Rourke
#90. 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
#91. When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.
P. J. O'Rourke
#93. Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.
P. J. O'Rourke
#94. Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.
P. J. O'Rourke
#95. Humor is a terrific tool for explaining things, especially when what you're explaining is frightening or dull and complicated.
P. J. O'Rourke
#96. The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.
P. J. O'Rourke
#97. Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.
P. J. O'Rourke
#98. Of course, no one wants to ban the vote. Voting should remain available for sporting and recreational purposes. But certain types of votes clearly should be curtailed - 'assault votes,' for example, in which the only purpose of the vote is to harm others.
P. J. O'Rourke
#99. Dates used to be made days or even weeks in advance. Now dates tend to be made the day after. That is, you get a phone call from someone who says, "If anyone asks, I was out to dinner with you last night, okay?"
P. J. O'Rourke
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
