P.J. O'Rourke Quotes

Politics is the art of achieving prestige and power without merit.

B students work for C students - A students teach.

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.

People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.

Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in.

Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there.

They don't like anyone who isn't Korean, and they don't like each other all that much, either. They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, 'the Irish of Asia'.

[ I'm] humorist, I guess. Or really more of a reporter. A reporter who reports on funny things.

Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it's cute but boring and expensive.

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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.

In case we have to shoot Democrats. It happened during the Civil War, and it could happen again.

In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.

Satan probably wouldn't have talked so big if God had been his wife.

Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked "What's the big idea?" knows, most big ideas are bad ones.

Happy hour is slightly different in the Soviet Union. There are no ice cubes or orange-peel twists in the vodka. Also, it lasts all day.

There's nothing more oily and cynical in politics than telling the truth.

I've decided that my motto in life is "Get off my lawn." It's the right answer to everything.

What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.

If we're free to do what we want, why does government always have a plan for us?

Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow ... It is impossible to be alive and safe.

The Democrats said, "We don't know what's wrong with America, but we can fix it." The Republicans said, "There's nothing wrong with America, and we can fix that."

Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal.

The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say.

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

Who, other than a crazy person, does anything besides hang up on a robo-call? Any call, any person, anywhere, under any circumstances.

Remember, your body needs 6 to 8 glasses of fluid daily. Straight up or on the rocks.

In a sense the whole American comic tradition had been that of social criticism.

I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.

Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.

What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.

Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.

But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone.

There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is - certainly is one of them. But it's low on my list.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

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

Bounty hunters these days - because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn't have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down.

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.

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

The Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns'n'Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance brokerin America who owns a pair of white shoes.

Whereas Rolling Stone, I just never had anything to do with them. I'd stop by the office maybe twice a year.

Lampoon was a very collegial operation, though "collegial" usually means "friendly" and it wasn't that friendly. But we were tight, like a family.

Jesse Jackson was spending time with his family, or families.

Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. And everything that isn't fun is dangerous too. It's impossible to be alive and safe.

Self-interest leads to honing your skills, the better to trade with.

I'll pick "I'm kidding" anytime over "I'm lying."

I was never in the office [of Rolling Stone]. It was very different from Lampoon, where we spent a lot of time together socially, which is to say "drunk."

I had grown up as a feature writer, and basically my career had been in The National Lampoon and as a magazine editor, and I'd never been a reporter.

Every pleasure you forgoe on Earth is a pleasure you won't get in heaven.

Then Saturday Night Live spawns... well, everything right down to American Pie 9, where all humor has to be irrelevant, which can get a little tiring.