Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
P. J. O'ROURKENo 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
-
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 -
Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God’s grace.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.
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 -
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.
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 -
Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren’t carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being ‘hegemonistic’, of engaging in ‘unilateralism’, of behaving as if we’re the only nation on earth that counts. We are.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’
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 -
Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he’s saving a parking place.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
P. J. O'ROURKE