You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.
P. J. O'ROURKEFinland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How’d they get so rich? Because they’re free.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
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Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.
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Let’s reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools – and use it on the teachers.
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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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No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.
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Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
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If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.
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Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.
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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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Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.
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Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
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Regulation creates a moral hazard.
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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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Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.
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Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.
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The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.
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There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.
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Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How’d they get so rich? Because they’re free.
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By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.
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Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
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There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
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The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.
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Rich people don’t like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don’t go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.
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Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.
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We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
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Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
P. J. O'ROURKE