Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that’s when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
P. J. O'ROURKEThe best and brightest don’t go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.
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I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I’m not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.
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When you’re a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, ‘Gee, I wouldn’t want to be doing that.’ They’re on your side.
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Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.
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Stupid is a great force in human affairs.
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The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
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Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.
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Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let’s hope so.
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The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you’re rich.
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I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.
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Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God’s grace.
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Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.
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Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
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Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
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If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
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Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
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A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
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Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
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The baby boomers’ politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there’s been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.
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The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry – knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission.
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You’re never going to read ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ and you shouldn’t, really. It’s 900 pages.
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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
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The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.
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The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.
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Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
P. J. O'ROURKE