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
The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
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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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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 -
Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.
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 -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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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When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he’s saving a parking place.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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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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.
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 -
If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it’s a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also – to do the lawn and clean the gutters.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.
P. J. O'ROURKE