Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about P. J. O'Rourke
P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
384 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Weird clothing is de rigeur for teenagers, but today's generation of teens is finding it difficult to be sufficiently weird. This is because the previous generation of teens, who went through adolescence in the sixties and seventies, used up practically all the available weirdness.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Guns are always the best method for a private suicide. They are more stylish looking than single-edged razor blades and natural gas has got so expensive. Drugs are too chancy. You might miscalculate the dosage and just have a good time.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
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.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
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.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
A compromise in the sense that being bitten in half by a shark is a compromise with being swallowed whole.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Incidentally, there's a balanced position that all of America's presidential candidates could take on the controversial abortion issue. If they want votes they shouldn't campaign to make abortion illegal or legal. They should campaign to make it retroactive. If a kid reaches 25 and he or she is still jobless, feckless, and sitting around Starbucks acting like a — no offense — European, then whack.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life - this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the pverty, not the difference. Wealth is good.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country?, contains ten chapters of fulminations convincing the convinced. However, Moore does include one chapter on how to argue with a conservative. As if. Approached by someone like Michael Moore, a conservative would drop a quarter in Moore's Starbucks cup and hurriedly walk away.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Good manners can replace religious beliefs. In the Anglican Church they already have. Etiquette (and quiet, well-cut clothes) are devoutly worshipped by Anglicans.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you've half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're doing a hundred miles an hour in a suburban side street.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
The old woman was not only ugly with the ugliness age brings us all but showed signs of formidable ugliness by birth - pickle-jar chin, mainsail ears and a nose like a trigonometry problem. What's more, she had the deep frown and snit wrinkles that come from a lifetime of bad character.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer. We can just step off the sidewalk. And sometimes we can get impressionable members of the opposite sex to perform sacramental rites with us. "Every drop of water wasted is a drop less of a wild and scenic river, Jennifer. We'd better double up in the shower."
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
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.
P. J. O'Rourke
Source
Report...
Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about 'character issues'. Either that or just go ahead and determine the presidency with three-legged races and pie-eating contests. It would make better TV.
P. J. O'Rourke
1
...
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
...
16
Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
P. J. O'Rourke
Creative Commons
Born:
November 14, 1947
Died:
February 15, 2022
(aged 74)
Bio:
Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourke was an American political satirist and journalist.
Known for:
Parliament of Whores (1991)
Give war a chance (1992)
Holidays in Hell (1988)
Eat the Rich (1998)
Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards (2010)
Most used words:
people
government
money
politics
bad
kind
life
children
car
human
years
power
time
free
war
P. J. O'Rourke on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
P. J. O'Rourke Short Quotes
American Journalist Quotes
Journalist Quotes
20th-century Journalist Quotes
Related People
H. L. Mencken
American Journalist
Christopher Guest
American Screenwriter
Henry Beard
American Editor
Tony Hendra
British Actor
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes