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'ROURKEWhen 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
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The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.
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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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Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
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Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.
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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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We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
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If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.
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The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
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There 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.
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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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Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
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The most brilliant satire of all time was ‘A Modest Proposal’ by Jonathan Swift. You’ll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.
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Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
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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.
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Let’s reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools – and use it on the teachers.
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The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
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Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
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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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Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
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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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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.
P. J. O'ROURKE