P.J. O'Rourke Quotes

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

A careful reading of 50 Simple Things leaves you wondering whether you're going to die from environmental disaster or intellectual annoyance. Failing either, you can worry yourself to death.

You may be surprised to discover you're rich, especially if you're broke.

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

Cars would be safer on rails!

First and foremost: Feed people.

The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society's ills can be cured politically. It's like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried.

A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It's a promissory note that doesn't actually promise anything. It's not backed by gold or silver.

I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck.

There's not a woman in the book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by Chapter 29.

I don't see evidence of America being a poorer country than it was 20 years ago. I've seen impoverished devastation. I've seen places where things had been good and now they were very bad.

Political stuff is all about his [Hunter S. Thompson] reaction to a situation. And my stuff is much more externally driven.

The Harvard Lampoon itself, which had a pretty stellar run in the '60s.

We're gonna be in a world of hurt if we don't get it fixed, because there's going to be billions of people out there - they're hungry, they're mad. One thing that they can get their hands on is guns.

I spent almost 25 years as a foreign correspondent, and the world's primary problem is poverty.

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.

We like to pile language on language. Hunter [ S. Thompson] was an influence on me, no doubt about it.

Normally, the job sucks but work is kinda fun, because you see your friends and flirt with girls and stuff.

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

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.

I'm 61 years old. I'm not that fearful of the future, period. I'm not going to see that much of it.

Everybody in 15th century Spain was wrong about where China was and as a result, Columbus discovered Caribbean vacations.

If you get outside the world of show business and its satellites, there's a whole world of car nuts in the Los Angeles area.

Michael O'Donoghue was a very close friend of mine - very encouraging with my stuff, and really a great guy - but he was a no-kidding difficult person.

Los Angeles is many places in one place.

I am a great admirer of women.

In the wake of Animal House, the stock briefly and quite wrongly shot up. So I love that movie.

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

It's much better to have your arguments dismissed because you might be joking than to have your arguments dismissed because you're not telling the truth.

Lampoon was exactly the opposite. The work was a lot of fun, but the office environment was hell. You cannot put 20 humorists together.

As a result of that, and as a result of friendship, I don't think we've ever been competitive. I mean, there's probably a very good reason Hunter [S. Thompson] isn't jealous of me.

I always thought there was some romance to that '30s leftist stuff, even though I'm a Republican.

Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer.

There aren't many political humorists. Dave Barry is excellent, but he doesn't do it much.

If you're doing a column, you kind of have to. Like in the back of Sports Illustrated, Rick Reilly has to find something to be mad about. It's not really the way I approach things.

I don't watch much television. Yeah, that's pretty funny. I don't know where The Daily Show stand politically, do you?

Bill Maher can be pretty good, except when he gets "important." Maher's all over the place politically.

[Al] Franken is left-wing and funny. He's a pretty good political humorist.

As a libertarian I believe we should have a federal government simple and circumscribed enough to be run by an average, dull, normal American. With George W. Bush we have half the equation in place.

That happy sense of purpose people have when standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet.

[Michael] Moore doesn't really use his sense of humor that much.

Whenever people tell you they are going to wipe the slate clean, it's your slate they mean to wipe.

On Michael Moore TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.

There's such a self-conscious balance that goes into television. Also, these are not people that think things through.

You read [Bill ] Maher's book, and he didn't take Econ 101. All his arguments about gasoline, it's not that they're right or wrong - they're just not informed.

I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser.

The question nowadays is not what makes government work. The question is how do we make it stop.

I like to take things that are boring-but-important and try to make them interesting. That was definitely what I was after with Eat The Rich.

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.

A good bachelor drinks his dessert (and sometimes the rest of his meals). A sweet tooth is a danger signal that you're getting too much exercise and not enough cocktails.