P. J. O'Rourke Thinking Quotations

I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.

I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a 'learning experience.' It makes me feel less stupid.

Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.

I'm a member of the working press; you'd think I'd know better than to listen to journalists.

Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history.

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you've got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags.

I can think of a number of areas in New York where three acres of nuclear waste would make the neighborhood safer to walk around in than it is now, and better lit.

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.

Well the planet I've got a chance to visit is Earth, and Earth's principal features are chaos and war. I think I'd be a fool to spend years here and never have a look.

I don't think I'll ever be a real boat reporter. My Rolex isn't big enough.

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right.

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

Summing it Up..."Where's a good place for dinner?" I asked. "There's the Brasserie Lipp on the Avenue St. Germaine," she said, "or La Coupole in Montmartre." "Not La Coupole," I said. "I've been there before. That's the place that's crowded and noisy and smells bad and everybody's rude as hell, isn't it?" "I think you just described France," she said.

In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word : Dentistry.

If libertarianism were easy to explain, and it weren't easy to exaggerate the effects of libertarianism, I think it would have been done already. Many many very intelligent people have applied themselves to crafting an agenda that people could grab ahold of. But the problem of course is that libertarianism isn't political. It is kind of anti-political. It wants to take a lot of things out of the political arena.

Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

With Epcot Center, the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of make-believe that's worse than regular life.

When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry.

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.

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.

Health care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting a high-powered coporate lawyer - Hillary - in charge of making it cheaper. (This is what I always do when I want to spend less money - hire a lawyer from Yale.) If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

Who does Bill Clinton think got off the boat and stepped on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers?

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

I remember thinking cocaine was subtle until I noticed I'd been awake for three weeks and didn't know any of the naked people passed out around me.

Think about last time you were broke ... now how well did it go with spending your way out of it? Did that work?

People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.