I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.
P. J. O'ROURKEExplosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
-
The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can’t do, shouldn’t do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.
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 -
The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
I’ve got a 1990 Porsche 911. It’s just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Liberals have invented whole college majors – psychology, sociology and women’s studies – to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
I’m too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom’s earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they’re right.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It’s a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.
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 -
Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization – an appeal to civilization itself.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.
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 -
I read good. I was an English major.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
A fundamental American question is, ‘What’s the big idea?’
P. J. O'ROURKE -
We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there.
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 -
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
A humorist doesn’t really do that much note-taking.
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