The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that’s the point.
P. J. O'ROURKEI’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
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The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can’t do, shouldn’t do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.
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People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.
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My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow… he wasn’t evil or anything, but he was worthless.
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I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.
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The best and brightest don’t go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
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New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State’s registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they’re going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can’t understand what they say.
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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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Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
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I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.
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The budget doesn’t have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn’t have much control over the budget.
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Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.
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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
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Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.
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Stupid is a great force in human affairs.
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The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.
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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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When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
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Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I’ve been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.
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All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.
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In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’
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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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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.
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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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In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
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Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.
P. J. O'ROURKE