Top 100 P J O'rourke Quotes
#1. As P. J. O'Rourke once observed, no woman daydreams about being swept off her feet by a liberal.
Greg Gutfeld
#2. Those who do not know history are probably also not doing well in English or math. P.J. O'Rourke
P. J. O'Rourke
#3. 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
#4. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P. J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
Christopher Buckley
#5. For me, my party views don't advance my narrative. Until I can find a way to write political satire like my idols Christopher Buckley or P.J. O'Rourke, I'll simply say what team I play for and leave it at that.
Jen Lancaster
#6. Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
P. J. O'Rourke
#7. The interesting thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is where the bullet comes out, yet what a big difference it would make in your social schedule.
P. J. O'Rourke
#8. 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
#9. Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.
P. J. O'Rourke
#10. The killjoys initiated automobile crash standards so rigorous that we can't buy a car that hasn't been dropped from the top of a phone pole with our whole family strapped inside.
P. J. O'Rourke
#12. 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
#13. Politicians show no signs of even knowing the difference between negative and positive rights. Blinded by the dazzle of anything that makes them popular, they honestly may not be able to tell.
P. J. O'Rourke
#14. 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'.
P. J. O'Rourke
#15. What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt.
P. J. O'Rourke
#16. The sky was so clear that the starlight cast shadows, and so many sparkles and glitters and glints appeared above us that it looked like something really expensive had been dropped and shattered in heaven - God's Steuben ashtray, maybe.
P. J. O'Rourke
#18. A girl who is really pretty - whether she wraps herself in an abayah, a nun's habit, or the front hall rug - never wraps herself so that the world can't tell.
P. J. O'Rourke
#19. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.
P. J. O'Rourke
#20. 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
#21. In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.
P. J. O'Rourke
#22. There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.
P. J. O'Rourke
#23. 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
#24. Masochists are people that have pleasure confused with pain. In a world that has television confused with entertainment, doritoes confused with food, and Dan Quayle confused with a national political leader, masochists are clearly less mixed-up than the rest of us.
P. J. O'Rourke
#25. Opinions of language are as interesting as opinions of arithmetic.
P. J. O'Rourke
#26. The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that's the point.
P. J. O'Rourke
#27. Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.
P. J. O'Rourke
#29. 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
#30. All previous populist movements were demanding things from governments, whereas the Tea Party is saying, 'Give us less, go away.' That's heartening to see.
P. J. O'Rourke
#31. 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
#32. There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.
P. J. O'Rourke
#33. In Toledo, people grow out. Out to the suburbs. Out to the parts of America where the economy is more vigorous. And all too often, out to 48-inch waistbands.
P. J. O'Rourke
#34. 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
#35. The free market is the greatest repository of our freedoms. Economic freedom is the freedom we exercise most often and to the greatest extent.
P. J. O'Rourke
#36. In case we have to shoot Democrats. It happened during the Civil War, and it could happen again.
P. J. O'Rourke
#37. 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
#38. The First Amendment only says 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' It can disrespect all it wants.
P. J. O'Rourke
#39. 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.
P. J. O'Rourke
#40. It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things.
P. J. O'Rourke
#41. 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
#42. One thing talk can't accomplish is communication. This is because everybody's talking too much to pay attention to what anyone is saying
P. J. O'Rourke
#43. Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.
P. J. O'Rourke
#45. Why do elites hate the poor? It's xenophobia. They don't know any poor people - except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don't speak English.
P. J. O'Rourke
#46. Fortunately, I discovered journalism. Talent hasn't been a question since. But
P. J. O'Rourke
#47. The purpose of sports - even foreign sports - is not to bore people.
P. J. O'Rourke
#48. I'm a member of the working press; you'd think I'd know better than to listen to journalists.
P. J. O'Rourke
#49. Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
P. J. O'Rourke
#50. 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
#51. Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.
P. J. O'Rourke
#52. Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace.
P. J. O'Rourke
#53. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P. J. O'Rourke
#54. 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
#55. Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.
P. J. O'Rourke
#56. 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
#57. Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided
with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest.
P. J. O'Rourke
#58. 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
#59. Anybody who's having fun at an Elk Lodge meeting has the fun thing figured out.
P. J. O'Rourke
#60. 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
#61. I have never been to a museum in Hong Kong, or a movie or a play. I've never gone club-hopping. I've never taken the tram to Victoria Peak.
P. J. O'Rourke
#63. 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
#64. Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.
P. J. O'Rourke
#65. Rich people don't like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don't go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.
P. J. O'Rourke
#66. Now majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But like other precious, sacred things ... it's not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza.
P. J. O'Rourke
#67. We all know the types who listen to Pete Seeger songs; even Pete admits they aren't interesting.
P. J. O'Rourke
#68. People have a right to my food, a right to my housing, and a right to my good job for my decent pay.
P. J. O'Rourke
#69. You can keep the dining room clean by eating in the kitchen.
P. J. O'Rourke
#70. Never strike anyone so old, small or weak that verbal abuse would have sufficed.
P. J. O'Rourke
#71. China is trying to become America without democracy while America is trying to become France without cheese calories.
P. J. O'Rourke
#72. There's something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.
P. J. O'Rourke
#73. 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
#74. Whenever people tell you they are going to wipe the slate clean, it's your slate they mean to wipe.
P. J. O'Rourke
#75. We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.
P. J. O'Rourke
#76. Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.
P. J. O'Rourke
#78. 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
#79. Maybe a vague president and an incompetent and somewhat corrupt administration is what the nation needs.
P. J. O'Rourke
#80. Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right.
P. J. O'Rourke
#81. At Epcot Center the Disney corporation has focused its attention on two things greatly in need of Disneyfication: the tedious future and the annoying whole wide world.
P. J. O'Rourke
#82. All religions must be made child-proof. Our teachers' unions have done good work in this field, K through 12. Delaying first communions and bar mitzvahs until age 21 would be another positive step.
P. J. O'Rourke
#83. The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
P. J. O'Rourke
#84. 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
#85. Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.
P. J. O'Rourke
#86. The web is just a device by which bad ideas travel around the globe at the speed of light.
P. J. O'Rourke
#87. The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.
P. J. O'Rourke
#88. Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race
P. J. O'Rourke
#89. Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that brightens life.
P. J. O'Rourke
#90. If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.
P. J. O'Rourke
#91. War expands government powers. The trouble is that, when the war goes away, the government powers do not.
P. J. O'Rourke
#92. solipsism of adolescence with its wild enthusiasms,
P. J. O'Rourke
#93. People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.
P. J. O'Rourke
#94. In a free country, government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference.
P. J. O'Rourke
#95. I arrived in the middle of a press conference - as boring a thing to sit through if you don't know the language as it is if you do.
P. J. O'Rourke
#96. If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
P. J. O'Rourke
#97. Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
P. J. O'Rourke
#98. I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with their constituents. The electorate now has instant information about what politicians have been up to.
P. J. O'Rourke
#99. 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
#100. 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
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