P.J. O'Rourke Quotes

Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.

Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

People are always afraid of the truth.

One of these suburbs is actually named Stalingrad, which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793.

I read good. I was an English major.

A couple of guys won Academy Awards for the things that I turned down. Today, after coming to terms with everything, after being in therapy for a long time-there are areas where I will compromise.

Hey, baby, nobody suffers like the poor.

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.

In Western Australia they don't even know how to make that vital piece of sailboating equipment, the gin and tonic.

I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.

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.

When are the world's political parties going to get appropriate symbols: snake, louse, jackal, ... trash can, clown face, ... dollar bill with bat wings on it?

The sport of skiing consists of wearing three thousand dollars worth of clothes and equipment and driving two hundred miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and get drunk.

Cats possess so many of the same qualities as some poeple that it is often hard to tell the people and the cats apart.

You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.

These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.

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

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

Even a band of angels can turn ugly and start looting if enough angels are unemployed and hanging around the Pearly Gates convinced that all the succubi own all the liquor stores in Heaven.

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

Actually, there is no way of making vomiting courteous. You have to do the next best thing, which is to vomit in such a way that the story you tell about it later will be amusing.

There is only one basic human right: the right to do as you please, without causing others harm. With it comes our only basic human duty: the duty to accept the consequences of our actions.

Smoking is very bad for you and should only be done because it looks so good. People who don't smoke have a terrible time finding something polite to do with their lips.

All that prosthetic makeup drains you. By the time it's lunch, you're done.

I behaved worse than anybody for 15 years, and you have to pay the price for that. I used to blame other people, then therapy made me realise I had to change.

Never wear anything that panics the cat.

Never fight an inanimate object.

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.

You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.

I'm really not afraid of spooky things. When I have to look really frightened, I concentrate on scary things like losing my kittens or something like that.

I have a St. Bernard named B.

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

Haitians weren't screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is.

I spent a lot of years trying to beat the system and, in the end, the system kicked my behind good.

Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation's capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.

People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.

My Grandmother wouldn't even speak the word Democrat if there were children in the room, she'd say Bastards instead.

Humor is a terrific tool for explaining things, especially when what you're explaining is frightening or dull and complicated.

Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.

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.

Some of your worst gangsters are guys who were very low-key.

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.

Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry.

There are no kinder or better people in the world than those who listen to you when you are 18.

The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you.