P. J. O'Rourke Quotes And Sayings

America Is A Meritocracy.

War Expands Government Powers. The Trouble Is That, When The War Goes Away, The Government Powers Do Not.

I Come From Toledo, Ohio, A Town That Has Been Hurt Badly By The Shift Of The Automobile Business Towards Japan. And Yet I Remember How The Car Workers Lived In The Neighborhood That I Grew Up In. My Father Was A Car Salesman, And I Remember How We Lived. I Remember How Modestly We Lived.

After The Events Of The 20th Century, God, Quite Reasonably, Left Europe. But He's Still Here In The United States.

I Know Quite A Few Fellow Members Of The News Analysis And Commentary Business, And I Have It From The Highest-placed Sources, On The Record, That Each And Every One Of Our Children Is A Genius.

Obama's Space Policy Doesn't Differ Much From George W. Bush's.

Demolishing Pretensions, Especially Worthy Ones, Is A Hallmark Of The Baby Boom.

Call A Man 'Ignorant,' And You Have License To Show The World Your Vast Fund Of Knowledge And Wise Him Up.

The Problem In Afghanistan Is Really Not So Much Land As Water. It's A Dry Country With Ample Amounts Of Water Running Through It, But Not To Good Enough Effect.

New Hampshire Polling Data Are Unreliable Because, When You Call The Granite State's Registered Republicans And Independents In The Middle Of Dinner And Ask Them Who They're Going To Vote For, They Have A Mouth Full Of Mashed Potatoes And You Can't Understand What They Say.

No Industry In Living Memory Has Collapsed Faster Than Daily Print Journalism.

You're Not A Baby Boomer If You Don't Have A Visceral Recollection Of A Kennedy And A King Assassination, A Beatles Breakup, A U.s. Defeat In Vietnam, And A Watergate.

We All Know The Types Who Listen To Pete Seeger Songs; Even Pete Admits They Aren't Interesting.

As Murderous Industrial Magnates Go, Alfred Nobel Is Right Up There With Ray Kroc, Franchiser Of Mcdonald's.

A Deadly Sins Addendum Is Long Overdue. Life Has Changed Since Pope Gregory The Great Scribbled His Initial List In The Sixth Century.

Jack Abramoff Is The World's Best Lobbyist - For The Federal Penitentiary System.

Nobody Is Making Americans Buy Chinese Goods.

America Is Not Doctrinaire. It's Hard For An American Politician To Come Up With An Ideological Position That Is Permanently Unforgivable.

Are You A Democrat Because You're A Union Member? Then Why, After Eight Years Of Bill Clinton, Does Some Chinese Guy In Guangdong Province Have Your Job?

President Bush Said That If Illegal Immigrants Want Citizenship, They'd Have To Do Three Things: Pay Taxes, Hold Meaningful Jobs, And Learn English. Bush Doesn't Meet Those Qualifications.

Love Can Never Be Fully Explained.

In Midlife, We're As Dumb As We Get.

The Purpose Of Sports - Even Foreign Sports - Is Not To Bore People.

Don't Send Funny Greeting Cards On Birthdays Or At Christmas. Save Them For Funerals, When Their Cheery Effect Is Needed.

Like It Or Not, I've Come To Appreciate Soccer. Any Kid Can Play, Which Fits With The Inclusive Agenda Of Progressive Schools. Although The Corollary To 'Any Kid Can Play' Is That Every Kid Must Play Because There Is An Iron Grip To The Warm Hug Of Progressive Inclusionism.

We've Come Into The World Of '1984,' But It Turns Out To Be '1984'-lite.

Everybody With A Gun Has A Checkpoint In Lebanon. And In Lebanon, You'd Be Crazy Not To Have A Gun. Though, I Assure You, All The Crazy People Have Guns, Too.

Liberals Are Always Proposing Perfectly Insane Ideas, Laws That Will Make Everybody Happy, Laws That Will Make Everything Right, Make Us Live Forever, And All Be Rich. Conservatives Are Never That Stupid.

Writing On A Computer Makes Saving What's Been Written Too Easy. Pretentious Lead Sentences Are Kept, Not Tossed. Instead Of Sitting Surrounded By Crumpled Paper, The Computerized Writer Has His Mistakes Neatly Stored In Digital Memory.

Public Schools Helped Create The Idea Of America And Inculcate Americans With A Few Rudiments Of Knowledge. To Judge By That Very American Item, The Internet, A Few Rudiments Is All Anyone Cares To Have.

Each Child Is Biologically Required To Have A Mother. Fatherhood Is A Well-regarded Theory, But Motherhood Is A Fact.

Arguing, In The Sense Of Attempting To Convince Others, Has Gone Out Of Fashion With Conservatives.

Regulation Creates A Moral Hazard.

The U.s. Tax Code Was Written By A Students. Every April 15, We Have To Pay Somebody Who Got An A In Accounting To Keep Ourselves From Being Sent To Jail.

Computers Seem A Little Too Adaptively Flexible, Like The Strange Natives, Odd Societies, And Head Cases We Study In The Social Sciences. There's More Opposable Thumb In The Digital World Than I Care For; It's Awfully Close To Human.

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.

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.

Infant Mortality And Life Expectancy Are Reasonable Indicators Of General Well-being In A Society.

Freedom Is Not Empowerment. Empowerment Is What The Serbs Have In Bosnia. Anybody Can Grab A Gun And Be Empowered.

The Problem, When Comparing Contemporary Television To Television In 1974, Is That Tv Has Become Not Just Bad But Sad.

Never Wear Anything That Panics The Cat.

It Could Be That All Awful Dictators Are Frustrated Artists - Mao With His Poetry And Mussolini With His Monuments. Stalin Was Once A Journalistic Hack, And I Can Personally Testify To How Frustrated They Are. Pol Pot Left A Very Edgy Photo Collection Behind. And Osama Seems Quite Interested In Video.

Think What Evil Creeps Liberals Would Be If Their Plans To Enfeeble The Individual, Exhaust The Economy, Impede The Rule Of Law, And Cripple National Defense Were Guided By A Coherent Ideology Instead Of Smug Ignorance.

Global Warming Is A Fact. Now It's Up To Liberals To Make It A Reality. Hence There Is Crucial Importance In Preventing Powerful, Greedy Free Market Forces From Getting In The Way Of Worsening Storms And Rising Sea Levels. The Kyoto Accord Is A Good First Step.

Bill Clinton Is Not A Hypocrite. If A Man Believes That It Is Just And Moral To Redistribute Wealth, There Is Nothing Hypocritical In His Attempts To Redistribute Some Of That Wealth To Himself.

Never Fight An Inanimate Object.

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.

Giving Money And Power To Government Is Like Giving Whiskey And Car Keys To Teenage Boys.

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.

I Live In New Hampshire. We're In Favor Of Global Warming. Eleven Hundred More Feet Of Sea-level Rises? I've Got Beachfront Property. You Tell Us Up There, 'By The End Of The Century, New York City Could Be Underwater,' And We Say, 'Your Point Is?'