P. J. O'Rourke

Quotes

• “Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in the valley of the Rive...”
• “The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-...”
• “Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to eac...”
• “Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. ...”
• “If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it's a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise th...”
• “When you pay a hospital bill, you're really paying two hospital bills - one bill for you because you have a job and/or i...”
• “It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stal...”
• “They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely lov...”
• “Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core o...”
• “The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end...”
• “I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet...”
• “Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet ...”
• “By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thou...”
• “I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those ...”
• “Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and sc...”
• “Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care i...”
• “When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By...”
• “Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the...”
• “Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities ...”
• “Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won't dig up the pretty lawn, won't plant a...”
• “The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and healt...”
• “In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and houn...”
• “I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with...”
• “I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had g...”
• “People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberat...”
• “I'm too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom's earring in his tongue, who combs his hai...”
• “Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will caus...”
• “We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has ...”
• “Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback ...”
• “I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy wh...”
• “Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by ...”
• “The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie, you're the Scary Dad. Never mind...”
• “There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'Amer...”
• “Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the cou...”
• “There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic grow...”
• “The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is n...”
• “All religions must be made child-proof. Our teachers' unions have done good work in this field, K through 12. Delaying f...”
• “Cars let us out of the barn and, while they were at it, destroyed the American nuclear family. As anyone who has had an ...”
• “I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid...”
• “There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently voguish phrase for i...”
• “The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by...”
• “The killjoys initiated automobile crash standards so rigorous that we can't buy a car that hasn't been dropped from the ...”
• “What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small that I have to search al...”
• “The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, ac...”
• “If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they c...”
• “There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is ...”
• “Something that confirms all fears and many conspiracy theories about government is finding out what our elected represen...”
• “Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright...”
• “Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even s...”
• “There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal particularly in women. Chief among these is the ...”