P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

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“I suspect the Haitian Ministry of Health's principal contribution to health in Haiti is providing nice, healthy jobs to those Haitians with the connection to get them.”

“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.”

“There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself. Keep your hands to yourself, Bill. Hillary, mind your own business.”

“Bachelors know all about parties. In fact, a good bachelor is a living, breathing party all by himself. At least that is what my girlfriend said when she found the gin bottles under the couch. I believe her exact words were, "You're a disgusting, drunken mess."”

“Most of the research about species extinction has been conducted on islands because islands are controlled environments and scientists can get drinks with little umbrellas in them there… Island logic also tells us that an increase in habitat size means an increase in number of species. But it doesn't necessarily. You can build your bed as large as you like and still get very few people to sleep with you.”

“Most of the chapters of this book were written while the events described were taking place. Reading the manuscript, I notice there's a lack of continuity between the chapters. One thing doesn't lead to another. This is because, in the 2016 presidential campaign, as far as I can tell, one thing didn't lead to another…. if my book lacks a coherent narrative it's because I couldn't find one.”

“Why can't everybody just get along? No reasonably detached person goes to Israel without being reduced in philosophical discourse to the level of Rodney King—or, for that matter, to the level of George Santayana. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," Santayana said, in one of those moments of fatuousness that come to even the most detached of philosophers. It goes double for those who can't remember anything else. And they do get along, after their fashion. Muslims and Christians and Jews have lived together in the Holy Land for centuries—hating one another's guts, cutting one another's throats, and touching off wars of various magnitudes. The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Some people say a front-engine car handles best. Some people say a rear-engine car handles best. I say a rented car handles best.”

“The morning meal was served in traditional socialist fashion— very slowly, with the courses out of order so that the jelly arrived half an hour after the toast and the coffee didn't come until we'd called for the check. However, it was hard to be angry at a place that had ice cream, beer, and cigarettes on its breakfast menu.”

“Cleaning, like seduction, should be done from the top down — starting with the ceiling, which is ridiculous. Gravity takes care of that.”

“Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.”

“The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.”

“I mean, so what if some fifty-eight-year-old butt-head gets a load on and starts playing Death Race 2000 in the rush-hour traffic jam? What kind of chance is he taking? He's just waiting around to see what kind of cancer he gets anyway. But if young, talented you, with all of life's possibilities at your fingertips, you and the future Cheryl Tiegs there, so fresh, so beautiful — if the two of you stake your handsome heads on a single roll of the dice in life's game of stop-the-semi — now that's taking chances! Which is why old people rarely risk their lives. It's not because they're chicken — they just have too much dignity to play for small stakes.”

“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.”

“The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborghini to the Grand Prix track to watch the charter buses race.”

“Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.”

“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.”

“Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And — since women are a majority of the population — we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there.”

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

“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.”

“There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as caring and sensitive because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he is willing to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he will do good with his own money — if a gun is held to his head.”

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

“When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.”

“Things are better now than things have been since men began keeping track of things. Things are better than they were only a few years ago. Things are better, in fact, than they were at 9:30 this morning, thanks to Tylenol and two Bloody Marys. But that's personal and history is general. It's always possible to come down with the mumps on V-J Day or to have, right in the middle of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a piece of it fall on your foot. In general, life is better than it ever has 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.”

“The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.”

“I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don't let it bother me. I don't let it bother me for one simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.”

“The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say.”

“I guess the argument of contextuality is that anything is okay as long as it's done by people who are sufficiently unlike you.”

“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.”

“No, it turns out Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction. And how crazy does that make Saddam? All he had to do was tell Hans Blix, 'Look anywhere you want. Look under the bed. Look beneath the couch. Look behind the toilet tank in the third presidential palace on the left, but keep your mitts off my copies of Maxim.' And Saddam could have gone on dictatoring away until Donald Rumsfeld gets elected head of the World Council of Churches. But no…”

“Industrialization came to England but has since left.”

“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.”

“A steady job is at least as deleterious to the spirit of bachelorhood as a steady date. Some jobs are worse than actual wives.”

“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.”

“Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.”

“The Italians have had two thousand years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place.”

“Iran and Iraq have been at war for five years now. The traditional present for a fifth anniversary is wood. Here's a gift suggestion: a big stick to beat some goddamned sense into their heads.”

“When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

“If Christ came back tomorrow, He'd have to change planes in Frankfurt. Modern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.”

“Biotechnology is a worry. What if they take genetic material from wet noodles and blowfish and splice it into politician chromosomes and create a Clinton administration?”

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

“Everything on a boat has a different name than it would have if it weren't on a boat. Either this is ancient seafaring tradition or it's how people who mess around with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished college.”

“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.”

“For some mysterious Darwinian reason, women feel compelled to straighten up bedrooms before and after sex. Try to make love in every other room of the house.”