P. J. O'Rourke - Bad Quotes

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Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner's Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.

P. J. O'Rourke
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.

P. J. O'Rourke
Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place.

P. J. O'Rourke
Nothing bad is going to happen to us. If we get fired, it's not failure; its a midlife vocational reassessment.

P. J. O'Rourke
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.

P. J. O'Rourke
Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

P. J. O'Rourke
Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.

P. J. O'Rourke
The typical old-fashioned diet was so bad it almost resembled modern dieting.

P. J. O'Rourke
Smoking is very bad for you and should only be done because it looks so good. People who don't smoke have a terrible time finding something polite to do with their lips.

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

P. J. O'Rourke
Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.

P. J. O'Rourke
Traffic was like a bad dog. It wasn't important to look both ways when crossing the street; it was important to not show fear.

P. J. O'Rourke
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is a case of bad men doing wrong things for wicked reasons. This is the full-sized or standard purebred evil and is easily recognized even by moral neophytes. Other malignities-drugs in America, famine in Africa and everything in the Middle East-are more complex. When combating those evils people sometimes have trouble deciding whom to shoot.

P. J. O'Rourke