P. J. O'Rourke Quotes And Sayings

I Just Wasn't Cut Out To Be A Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm More Of An Irish Setter Dad.

Barack Obama Is More Irritating Than The Other Nuisances On The Left.

Democrats Hate Stay-at-home Spouses, No Matter What Gender Or Gender Preference.

Pete Seeger Is A Modest, Unassuming, Cheerful, And Kind-natured Man. He's A Good Folk Singer, If You Can Stand Folk Singing. And He's Such An Excellent Banjo Player That You Almost Don't Wish You Had A Pair Of Wire Cutters.

When You Pay A Hospital Bill, You're Really Paying Two Hospital Bills - One Bill For You Because You Have A Job And/or Insurance And Can Pay The Hospital. And Another Bill, Which Is Tacked Onto Your Bill, To Cover The Medical Expenses Of Someone Who Doesn't Have A Job And/or Insurance And Can't Pay The Hospital.

In The Language Of Politics, There Is Only One Translation For The Phrase 'Hope And Change,' To Wit: 'Big, Fat Government.'

Politicians Will Talk Strategy And Tactics And Policies And Programs Until They're Blue In The Face, Or You Strangle Them And They Turn Blue.

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.

Chinese Economic Development Has Cost Many American Workers Their Jobs. That's The Price Of Progress.

The Importance Of Local Governance May Not Be Obvious To An America Accustomed To Treating City And State Downfalls With Doses Of Federal Comeuppance. Sometimes There's A Reason For That - The Civil War. More Often, All Reasoning Seems Absent - No Child Left Behind.

Corporate Corruption Has Ecological Merits. It's Helping To Preserve That Species Known As Democrats - Thought To Be Endangered As Recently As The Year 2000.

The First Amendment Only Says 'Congress Shall Make No Law Respecting An Establishment Of Religion.' It Can Disrespect All It Wants.

The Subculture Of Felons Is In Great Vogue Among Adolescents. Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, And So Forth Allow Us Republicans To Say To America's Young People, 'We Be Thugs.' The Gop May Capture The Youth Vote At Last.

Accuse A Person Of Breaking All Ten Commandments, And You've Written The Promo Blurb For The Dust Cover Of His Tell-all Memoir.

Some Day You Will Be Wheeled In For A Heart Bypass Operation, And A Surgeon Will Be The Person Who Is Now Behind The Counter When You Renew Your Car Registration At The Department Of Motor Vehicles.

Detroit's Industrial Ruins Are Picturesque, Like Crumbling Rome In An 18th-century Etching.

In Theory, Taxes Should Be Like Shopping. What I Buy Is Government Services. What I Pay Are My Taxes.

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.

There Are A Few Things That People All Around The World Need To Admit To Themselves. Trade Restraints Slow Economic Growth, The Euro Is Not A Reserve Currency, And Scoreless Sports Ties Are Boring.

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.

Earnestness Is Stupidity Sent To College.

There Is One Thing Women Can Never Take Away From Men. We Die Sooner.

Everybody In America Who Didn't Come Over The Bering Strait Ice Bridge Stole His Land From Somebody Else.

Ideology, Politics And Journalism, Which Luxuriate In Failure, Are Impotent In The Face Of Hope And Joy.

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.

Zero-sum Thinking Is An Obsession Of Mine, But Mostly In Economics.

A Humorist Doesn't Really Do That Much Note-taking.

It's Better To Make Fun Of Yourself Because You've Always Got Someone Around To Make Fun Of, And They Can't Sue You.

I Write Because I Like To Make Things And The Only Things I Am Good At Making Things With Are Words.

Who, Other Than A Crazy Person, Does Anything Besides Hang Up On A Robo-call? Any Call, Any Person, Anywhere, Under Any Circumstances.

People Will Tell You Anything But What They Do Is Always The Truth.

All Change Is Bad. But Sometimes It Has To Be Done.

I Don't Even Know Which End Of A Computer One Is Supposed To Gaze Into. I've Never Used A Computer.

Political Systems Are Run By Self-selecting Politicians. We Don't Draft People; It's Not Jury Duty.

Preachers At Black Churches Are The Last People Left In The English-speaking World Who Know The Schemes And Tropes Of Classical Rhetoric: Parallelism, Antithesis, Epistrophe, Synecdoche, Metonymy, Periphrasis, Litotes - The Whole Bag Of Tricks.

I Read Good. I Was An English Major.

Something Is Worth What Somebody Will Pay For It. Nothing Else, Nothing More, Nothing Less.

Hubris Is One Of The Great Renewable Resources.

Distracting A Politician From Governing Is Like Distracting A Bear From Eating Your Baby.

I Think It's Always Easy To Be Sympathetic To Parts Of The Government In Detail; In Their Concrete Manifestations. Because Obviously, We Don't Have Government For No Reason.

One Nice Thing About Making Jokes Is That You Don't Have To Prove Them.

One Of The Few Benefits Of Being A Journalist Is That You're Not In The Army.

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.

I Like To Have Interesting Things To Write About. And When One Says Something Is 'Interesting,' One Almost Always Means 'Bad.'

Why Can't Death - If We Must Have It - Be Always Glorious, As In 'The Iliad?'

If You Think Health Care Is Expensive Now, Just Wait 'Til It's Free.

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.

Adam Smith Is Misread As Being Amoral Precisely Because People Don't Read His First Book, Because They Don't Read 'The Theory Of Moral Sentiments.'

If Ever There Were A Place Where People Not Only Tend Not To Face Economic Facts, But It's Almost Their Purpose Not To Face Economic Facts, It's Washington.

Liberals Have Invented Whole College Majors - Psychology, Sociology And Women's Studies - To Prove That Nothing Is Anybody's Fault.