P. J. O'Rourke Quotes And Sayings

All Business Is Capitalistic. You Require Capital For Any Sort Of Business Endeavour.

People Say Free Trade Causes Dislocation. In Actual Fact, It's The Lowering Of Trade Barriers That Causes The Dislocation.

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.

In Its Worse Forms, Conservatism Is A Matter Of 'I Hate Strangers And Anything That's Different.'

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.'

I Am A Student Of Stupidity. I Am A Political Reporter.

When Elites See A Homeless Person In The Gutter, They Assume He's Saving A Parking Place.

Woodstock Had A Tremendous Impact On American Artistic Life.

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.

There Are Selves Too Big For One Person To Contain. You Cannot Call Them Selfish. There Is Nothing -Ish About Such Selves. They Are The Self, As It Were, Itself.

Raining On Parades Requires No Skill Or Effort On The Part Of A Politician.

You Can't Get Rid Of Poverty By Giving People Money.

Toledo Is Better Than Exciting, It's Happy. Because Nothing Is More Conducive To Unhappiness Than Taking Yourself Seriously, And Taking Yourself Seriously Is Difficult When You're Baseball Team Is The Mud Hens.

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.

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.

Family Love Is Messy, Clinging, And Of An Annoying And Repetitive Pattern, Like Bad Wallpaper.

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.

Children Must Be Considered In A Divorce Considered Valuable Pawns In The Nasty Legal And Financial Contest That Is About To Ensue.

Humans Are The Only Animals That Have Children On Purpose With The Exception Of Guppies, Who Like To Eat Theirs.

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.

Gossip Is What You Say About The Objects Of Flattery When They Aren't Present.

The Idea Of Capitalism Is Not Just Success But Also The Failure That Allows Success To Happen.

Not Much Was Really Invented During The Renaissance, If You Don't Count Modern Civilization.

You Know Your Children Are Growing Up When They Stop Asking You Where They Came From And Refuse To Tell You Where They're Going.

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.

Southern California Is A Nice Place, If You Could Cut Out The Show-business Cancer. It Just Keeps Spreading.

Nobody Likes Insurance Companies, Especially Health Insurance Companies.

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.

What Would Annoy The Most People Most Often? That Is The True Left-wing Test Of Government Intervention.

The Body Is Forever Teaching Us Lessons. There Are All Sorts Of Things That We Can't Do, Shouldn't Do, Had Better Not Do Very Often Or Do For Too Long As We Get Older. The Body Makes Its Presence Known.

You Don't Despair About Something Like The Middle East, You Just Do The Best You Can.

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.

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.

People Think The Free Market Is A Philosophy, They Think That It Is A Creed. It Is None Of Those Things. Free Market Is A Bathroom Scale, It Is A Measuring Tape, It's Simply A Measurement.

Sheep Farming Is Heavily Subsidized In Great Britain. Without The Subsidies, The Green Grazing In The Valley Of The River Exe Would Be Gone. The Handsome Agricultural Landscape Of Which The British Are So Proud, Carefully Husbanded Since Boudicca's Day, Would Be Replaced By Natural Growth. The Most Likely Growth Is Real-estate Developments.

The Whole Idea Of Our Government Is This: If Enough People Get Together And Act In Concert, They Can Take Something And Not Pay For It.

Health Care's Not About Insurance! Health Care's About Getting Treatment.

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.

Abstract Anger Is Great For Rhetorical Carrying On. You Can Go On Endlessly About The Post Office, But It Doesn't Mean You're Mad At Your Mailman.

Governments Have Monopolies On Certain Things, Like Eminent Domain And Deadly Force.

I Had Always Thought Of Egypt As A Rather Secular Country. And I Think It Is, But People Are Quite Observant Of The Strictures Of Ramadan.

Only A Few Good Leaders Have Paused To Reflect Seriously On Being Leaders.

Wealth Is Not A Pizza, Where If I Have Too Many Slices You Have To Eat The Domino's Box.

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.

Everybody In The Middle East Wants To Explain Why They're Right.

The Perpetuation Of Slavery, The Exile And Extermination Of American Indians, And The Passage Of Jim Crow Laws Weren't Carried Out At The Bidding Of A Few Malefactors Of Great Wealth.

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.

We Loved Cars Until The '70s Or So. Then They Became Appliances. They Turned Into Motorized Cup Holders. Most Of It Has To Do With Urban Sprawl. What Began As Pleasure Ends Up In Necessity, As So Many Things Do.

Globalization Is Simply Opening The Free Marketplace To Encompass The Entire World.

There Is The Love And Marriage And Family Kind Of Happiness, Which Is Exceedingly Boring To Describe But Nonetheless Is Important To Have And Dreadful Not To Have.