P.J. O'Rourke Quotes

I spent so long studying really hard to become a fine actor, but threw it all away because I got the adulation and the fame so easily

Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.

If you look closely at some scenes in Diner, my eyes look like Dracula's.

I have a really good relationship with a lot of designers. I like Gaultier, Billionaire and Cavalli.

I have so many boxing gloves around my house that I would get them confused with other gloves.

I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff.

My dogs are more important than my family.

There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.

When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.

We had a choice between Democrats who couldn't learn from the past and Republicans who couldn't stop living in it.

Although computer-generated artificial intelligence eludes us, artificial stupidity has been perfected.

Drugs have taught an entire generation of kids the metric system

Vegetables are something God invented to let women get even with their children.

Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.

The difference between corporations and governments is governments have a monopoly on force. It's a lot easier to vote with your feet or your wallet than it is to change a government with your vote.

Then there's politics. Just imagine politics with its dumbbell element subtracted. There would be no Republican candidates. There would be no Democratic voters. The whole system would collapse.

It's the squares who know how to fly the fighter planes and operate the missiles and the bombs and work the M-16s. Liberals would still be fumbling with the federally mandated trigger locks.

Hunter S. Thompson brings a lunatic genius to ordinary events, and I bring an ordinary sensibility to lunatic events.

There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.

Detroits industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

A girl who is really pretty - whether she wraps herself in an abayah, a nun's habit, or the front hall rug - never wraps herself so that the world can't tell.

When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it is (certain body parts excepted) done away with. But a public entity gets bigger.

Maybe a vague president and an incompetent and somewhat corrupt administration is what the nation needs.

Hunter S. Thompson and I are old friends, but what we do is so different. There are surface similarities that really have to do with us being frustrated poets.

The Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.

Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.

You can smoke or drink on a golf course without interrupting the game, and you can take a leak - something you can't do on a squash court and shouldn't do in a swimming pool.

It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things.

Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.

Like Rick in Casablanca: "We'll always have Paris." When what we'll always have is, like, Brooklyn and arguments about [Lev] Trotsky.

I arrived in the middle of a press conference - as boring a thing to sit through if you don't know the language as it is if you do.

Any person who has spent time outdoors actually doing something, such as hunting and fishing as opposed to standing there with a doobie in his mouth, knows nature is not intrinsically healthy.

In the wake of Animal House, all of us at the Lampoon had a lot of Hollywood opportunities. We could definitely get people to return phone calls.

The Middle Eastern states aren't nations; they're quarrels with borders.

Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.

There's a very good reason that governments aren't supposed to compete with private-enterprise companies. Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.

It had never occurred to us that the Kremlin's new anti-booze campaign would apply to journalists. Now, that's a human-rights violation.

Modern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.

That is the really great thing about being an adult male, once you get married and have children the whole decision-making process is taken out of your hands, and I for one am extremely grateful.

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.

There is that kind of happiness. There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.

Just as some things are too strange for fiction, others are too true for journalism.

We'll run this planet as we please, and if you don't like it, go back where we came from.

Politicians are wonderful people as longa as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.

I'm certainly not fearful.

No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works.

The problem isn't a Congress that won't cut spending or a president who won't raise taxes. The problem is an American public with a bottomless sense of entitlement to federal money.

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

Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since.

I've always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He'd have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with.