P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Humor is, by its nature, more truthful than factual.

The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.

How much fame, money and power does a woman have to achieve on her own before you can punch her in the face?

Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

Anything that makes your mother cry is fun

Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.

Who does Bill Clinton think got off the boat and stepped on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers?

I like to have interesting things to write about. And when one says something is 'interesting,' one almost always means 'bad.'

The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.

If the Japanese want to be taken seriously as world financial powers, they'd better quit using the same tailor as variety show chimps.

I don't even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I've never used a computer.

I remember thinking cocaine was subtle until I noticed I'd been awake for three weeks and didn't know any of the naked people passed out around me.

The typical old-fashioned diet (in the nineteenth century) was so bad it almost assembled modern dieting.

Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.

Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of progress.

I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.

The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.

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.

Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.

I am unboreable in the great outdoors.

The First Amendment only says 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' It can disrespect all it wants.

Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.

My generation of Americans was the first to really care about racism and sexism, not to mention the I Ching, plus, of course, the Earth.

Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste and style mixed together so that you don't need any of those things.

There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.

Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.

Everybody in America who didn't come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.

Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.

Fishing is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

Obama, in pursuit of power, has been as greedy and irresponsible as any Wall Street tycoon in pursuit of money.

The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.

There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.

Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.

If we do our deficit spending on weapons, at least we get weapons. Then if we need weapons, we have them. If we don't need them, no harm is done.

There can be no greater sacrifice than that a man lay down his lifestyle for others. And

Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.

Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.

Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection.

The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.

Sucking the fun out of life has always been an important component of politics.

There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.

Politics should be limited in scope to ware, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class.

I rarely meet a politician that I don't like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.

I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.

Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that brightens life.

Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.

The Russians could have some (warheads) aimed at Japan, so if we act up they can destroy our economy.

You've got to understand, people are motivated by fun. And they should be.

Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization - an appeal to civilization itself.

The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin.

The sternest commissar and the wildest hippie both share the same daydream: that a thing can be worth other than people are willing to give for it.

When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.

Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.

Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.

We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.

Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.

Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.

Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please.

Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.

After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States.

God has no role to play in politics except to make sure politicians go where they belong. To hell.

Moviemakers are rewarded with tax write-offs if, when seeking a location that looks like America, they seek it in America.

The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.

How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

I was never a Democrat. I went from Republican to Maoist and then back again.

More modern poetry is written than read.

Imagine having journalists in your own home and not even covering the furniture with plastic sheets first.

Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen.

Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free - indeed, sanctimonious - way for progressives to be racists.

In thirteen years, every aspect of the universe can change - ask a thirteen-year-old.

I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.

When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he's saving a parking place.

Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.

Wearing a hat implies that you are bald if you are a man and that your hair is dirty if you are a woman.

The words 'Space Age' have a quaint, nostalgic tone - sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching 'The Jetsons.'

In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America.

Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?

Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty.

I am a student of stupidity. I am a political reporter.

War diminishes both civil and economic rights.

I'm really tired of virtue.

You can keep the dining room clean by eating in the kitchen.

Demolishing pretensions, especially worthy ones, is a hallmark of the baby boom.

The real alternative to power of the rich is not power of the poor. It's just plain power.

I don't understand anything about America's culture.

Taxi drivers all over the world, by the way, are under Newspaper Guild contract to give easy quotes to foreign correspondents.

In Washington journalists can afford to live almost as well as people who work for a living.

All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.

Harvard is the home of American ideas.

President Obama has contempt for real money.

Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it's number 1,000,000,001.

One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you're not in the Army.

My life would have gone along perfectly well, politically speaking, if it hadn't been for girls.

The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.