A fundamental American question is, ‘What’s the big idea?’
P. J. O'ROURKEThink what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.
More P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
-
-
I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I’m not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.
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 -
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 -
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 -
We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.
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 -
In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.
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.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it’s simply a measurement.
P. J. O'ROURKE -
Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
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