If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
P. J. O'ROURKEThere is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
-
We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a promissory note that doesn’t actually promise anything. It’s not backed by gold or silver.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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'ROURKE -
Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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'ROURKE -
The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there’s a reason for that – the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent – No Child Left Behind.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
As a former writer for the ‘National Lampoon,’ I’ve probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren’t present.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
A fundamental American question is, ‘What’s the big idea?’
P. J. O'ROURKE