To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You’d better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.
P. J. O'ROURKEPreachers 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.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
-
Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I’ve been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.
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 -
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
I believe in God. God created the world.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Call a man ‘ignorant,’ and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
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 baby boomers’ politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there’s been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
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 -
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 -
In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’
P. J. O'ROURKE






