You can’t destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America’s elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you’re doing us a favor.
P. J. O'ROURKEA fundamental American question is, ‘What’s the big idea?’
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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Call a man ‘ignorant,’ and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.
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Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
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They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, ‘But doesn’t it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn’t it be set in New Guinea?’ And you say, ‘But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.’
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Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
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I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.
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Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.
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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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You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.
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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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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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People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.
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America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
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Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
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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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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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Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.
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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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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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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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I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
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Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
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No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it’s probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.
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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.
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Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.
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It’s better to make fun of yourself because you’ve always got someone around to make fun of, and they can’t sue you.
P. J. O'ROURKE