Quotes by
P.J. O’ Rourke |
1947-2022 , American columnist & writer
| 45 quotes | 1,300 visits |
Quotations
| • | Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of. 7 |
| • | At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats. 5 |
| • | Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us. 4 |
| • | Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste and style mixed together so that you don't need any of those things. 4 |
| • | Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it's cute but boring and expensive. 4 |
| • | Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren't present. 4 |
| • | It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China's one-child policy or America's one-parent policy. 3 |
| • | Each American embassy comes with two permanent features: a giant anti-American demonstration and a giant line for American visas. 3 |
| • | One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. 2 |
| • | War will exist as long as there's a food chain. 2 |
| • | 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. 2 |
| • | Wealth makes materialism easier to bear. |
| • | It's better to spend money like there's no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there's no money. |
| • | If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult. |
| • | There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. |
| • | People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. |
| • | If government were a product, selling it would be illegal. |
| • | When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. |
| • | Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. |
| • | Marxism has tremendous appeal in the Third World for exactly the same reason it had tremendous appeal to me in college. It gives you something to believe in when what surrounds you seems unbelievable. It gives you someone to blame besides yourself. It's theoretically tidy. And, best of all, it's fully imaginary so it can never be disproved. |
| • | There's only one secret to bachelor cooking — not caring how it tastes. |
| • | I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books. |
| • | Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun. |
| • | To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze. |
| • | I guess the argument of contextuality is that anything is okay as long as it's done by people who are sufficiently unlike you. |
| • | Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking. |
| • | Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening. |
| • | There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off. |
| • | The 2016 presidential campaign is the most severe case of mass psychosis since the Salem witch trials of 1692. |
| • | Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it. |
| • | Most of the people who have grabbed hold of climate change and greenhouse gases, pollution, oil dependency - they have another motive, and their motive is to attain the appearance of virtue without having actually done anything virtuous. |
| • | There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable. They still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States. |
| • | I rarely meet a politician that I don't like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger. |
| • | 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. |
| • | B students work for C students. A students teach. |
| • | Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less. |
| • | Detroit’s industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching. |
Funny Quotes
| • | There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible. 6 |
| • | We had a choice between Democrats who couldn't learn from the past and Republicans who couldn't stop living in it. 3 |
| • | Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. |
| • | Everybody wants to save the world but nobody wants to help mom with the dishes. |
| • | Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. |
| • | Remember, your body needs 6 to 8 glasses of fluid daily. Straight up or on the rocks. |
| • | 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.” |
| • | Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living. |
