P. J. O'Rourke Quotations | Page 6

How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

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.

The interesting thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is where the bullet comes out, yet what a big difference it would make in your social schedule.

A woman should dress to attract attention. To attract the most attention, a woman should be either nude, or wearing something as expensive as getting her nude is going to be.

Never Refuse Wine. It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone who doesn't drink must be an alcoholic.

To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.

You'll note that politicians no longer spend money, they invest it. Don't worry about paying more to the [IRS]. You aren't being taxed; you're taking a plunge on a fly-by-night stock issue.

The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts - squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.

I believe that Western civilization, after some disgusting glitches, has become almost civilized. I believe it is our first duty to protect that civilization. I believe it is our second duty to improve it. I believe it is our third duty to extend it if we can.

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.

God has no role to play in politics except to make sure politicians go where they belong. To hell.

In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor.

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.

The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborgini to the Gran Prix track to watch the charter buses race.

If the wind is blowing like stink and everything is working right, a twelve-meter sailboat can go eleven and a half or twelve miles an hour, the same speed at which a bond lawyer runs around the Cental Park Reservoir.

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

A dugout is much superior to a conventional manufactured canoe because you can get soaking wet without bothering to capsize it.

The Constitution is an equally forthright piece of work and quite succinct ... giving the complete operating instructions for a nation of 250 million people. The manual for a Toyota Camry, which only seats five, is four times as long.

The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin. The next best vegetable is the jalapeno pepper. It has the virtue of turning salads into practical jokes.

The only time a bachelor's bed is made is when it's in the factory.

That doesn't mean that you should just sit back and just let accidents happen to you. No, you have to go out and cause them yourself. That way you're in control of the situation.

How much fame, money and power does a woman have to achieve on her own before you can punch her in the face?

Actually, there is no way of making vomiting courteous. You have to do the next best thing, which is to vomit in such a way that the story you tell about it later will be amusing.

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

In the past a man was expected to give his seat on a bus to a woman. Today it would be much more courteous for that man to give her his job.

It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). And this is not just a Somali problem. We have poverty and deprivation in our own country. Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last.

I try to ONLY ridicule people who's efforts are sincere. Very little trouble has been caused in the world by insincere efforts. An occasional seduction maybe. There were very few insincere Stalinists or Nazis.

The purpose of the Senate is to keep 100 middle aged knuckleheads out of the private sector where they can do real harm.

The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 - to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell.

The sport of skiing consists of wearing three thousand dollars worth of clothes and equipment and driving two hundred miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and get drunk.

Thanksgiving is so called because we are all so thankful that it only comes once a year.

Dating is the social engagement with the threat of sex at its conclusion.

This is the most elaborate and luxurious method of convincing others that you can cook. Take everybody out on your yacht until they're green in the face. Then you can rave for weeks about your sauce marinara and no one will gainsay you..

You can't get something for nothing. Everybody remembers this except politicians.

Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection.

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.

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

Drugs have taught an entire generation of kids the metric system

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

In Western Australia they don't even know how to make that vital piece of sailboating equipment, the gin and tonic.

Never steal anything so small that you'll have to go to an unpleasant city jail for it instead of a minimum-security federal tennis prison.

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.

The very existence of the bicycle is an offense to reason and wisdom.

The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.

The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors--psychology, sociology, women's studies--to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.

People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.

Getting down on all fours and imitating a rhinoceros stops babies from crying. (Put an empty cigarette pack on your nose for a horn and make loud "snort" noises.) I don't know why parents don't do this more often. Usually it makes the kid laugh. Sometimes it sends him into shock. Either way it quiets him down. If you're a parent, acting like a rhino has another advantage. Keep it up until the kid is a teenager and he definitely won't have his friends hanging around your house all the time.

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?

The typical old-fashioned diet (in the nineteenth century) was so bad it almost assembled modern dieting.

The wise traveler [to Beirut] will pack shirts or blouses with ample breast pockets. Reaching inside a jacket for your passport looks too much like going for the draw and puts armed men out of countinence

To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

Politics is the art of achieving prestige and power without merit.

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 complexity of economics can be calculated mathematically. Write out the algebraic equation that is the human heart and multiply each unknown by the population of the world.

The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.

Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations.

I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.

Australia is not very exclusive. On the visa application they still ask if you've been convicted of a felony - although they are willing to give you a visa even if you haven't been.

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

When a couple decides to divorce, they should inform both sets of parents before having a party and telling all their friends. This is not only courteous but practical. Parents may be very willing to pitch in with comments, criticism, and malicious gossip of their own to help the divorce along.

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

And, by the way, how come all the people who were so in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament are so opposed to unilateral protection against nukes?

I suppose I should get a VCR, but the only thing I like about television is its ephemerality.

The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. Being a Republican, I'm backing Hillary Clinton. Because she could lose. The reason is not that she's a woman. The reason is that she's the particular woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in. Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is 'America's ex-wife.'

Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.

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.

Haitians weren't screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is.

Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free— indeed, sanctimonious— way for progressives to be racists.

In Japan people drive on the left. In China people drive on the right. In Vietnam it doesn't matter.

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.

Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest.

Because of their cuisine, Germans don't consider farting rude. They'd certainly be out of luck if they did.

The Italians have had 2,000 years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place!

Oh, God. The Sixties are coming back. Well I've got a 12-gauge double-barreled duck gun chambered for three-inch Magnum shells. And - speaking strictly for this retired hippie and former pinko beatnik - if the Sixties head my way, they won't get past the porch steps. They will be history. Which, for chrissakes, is what they're supposed to be.

A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of defense.

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.

Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen. "Get shot! Get killed! Get diseases from foreign women who despise you in their hearts!"

The three branches of government number considerably more than three and are not, in any sense, 'branches' since that would imply that there is something they are all attached to besides self-aggrandizement and our pocketbooks. ... Government is not a machine with parts; it's an organism. When does an intestine quit being an intestine and start becoming an asshole?

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.

Every pleasure you forgoe on Earth is a pleasure you won't get in heaven.

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please.

The Vietnamese Hoa were merchants and manufacturers. They were very successful and thus, according to the logic of Marxism, responsible for society's failures. The Hoa suffered the same fate as the pizza parlour in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing except at the hands of the world's fourth largest army instead of a small, petulant movie director.

Government conspiracy? They can't even deliver our mail and it's got our address on it and everything!

My Grandmother wouldn't even speak the word Democrat if there were children in the room, she'd say Bastards instead.

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

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.

African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.

A pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.

Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.

Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Gluttony, or, as we call them these days, "getting in touch with your sexuality," "raising your self-esteem," "relaxation therapy," and "being a recovered bulimic."

.......the poor of the world cannot be made rich by redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape. Economic leveling doesn't work. Whether we call it Marxism, Progressive Reform, or Clintonomics, the result is the same slide into the stygian pit. Communists worship Satan; socialists think perdition is a good system run by bad men; and liberals want us to go to hell because it's warm there in the winter.

I've been a New Yorker for ten years, and the only people who are nice to us turn out to be Moonies.

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?

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look.

Feminism is the result of a few ignorant and literal-minded women letting the cat out of the bag about which is the superior sex. Once women made it public that they could do things better than men, they were, of course, forced to do them.

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

The only really firm rule of taste about cross dressing is that neither sex should ever wear anything they haven't yet figured out how to go to the bathroom in.

Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley!

Never strike anyone so old, small or weak that verbal abuse would have sufficed.

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