P. J. O'Rourke
People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.Collection: Wise
I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck.Collection: People
Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.Collection: Moving
West Germans are tall, pink, pert and orthodontically corrected, with hands, teeth and hair as clean as their clothes and clothes as sharp as their looks. Except for the fact that they all speak English pretty well, they're indistinguishable from Americans.Collection: Funny
The problem isn't a Congress that won't cut spending or a president who won't raise taxes. The problem is an American public with a bottomless sense of entitlement to federal money.Collection: Cutting
The average IQ in America is—and this can be proven mathematically—average.Collection: Average
Ever read any [Friedrich] Hayek? He's great. The Road To Serfdom is like... I'm not a big political-science reader, but I actually dog-eared my copy. I ended up going back through it and writing a précis, I was so impressed by this book. It's all about what happens when government tries to make everything right.Collection: Dog
Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen.Collection: Funny
A careful reading of 50 Simple Things leaves you wondering whether you're going to die from environmental disaster or intellectual annoyance. Failing either, you can worry yourself to death.Collection: Reading
Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in.Collection: Government
Wearing a hat implies that you are bald if you are a man and that your hair is dirty if you are a woman.Collection: Fashion
Maybe a vague president and an incompetent and somewhat corrupt administration is what the nation needs.Collection: President
Never do anything to a clitoris with your teeth that you wouldn't do to an expensive waterproof wristwatch.Collection: Teeth
Cars would be safer on rails!Collection: Car
Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.Collection: Cheating
Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right.Collection: Thinking
Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations.Collection: Stupid
We won't dispassionately investigate or rationally debate which drugs do what damage and whether or how much of that damage is the result of criminalization. We'd rather work ourselves into a screaming fit of puritanism and then go home and take a pill.Collection: Home
The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn't occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn't go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.Collection: Gun
Gambling is so pervasive in Nevada that maybe the state should just go the whole hog. There'd be gum machines that dispensed chewing tobacco if you lost. You could gamble for the toilet paper in public bathroom stalls. And fill out Keno cards in an attempt to win cancer therapy at the hospital.Collection: Cancer
Commies love concrete.Collection: Concrete
It is important to remember when making jokes about women, that they are not a minority. They weren't captured on another continent and brought here in leg-irons (funny shoes, yes, but not leg-irons) and Hitler didn't blame them for Germany's loss in WWI. Therefore, you can make any kind of fun of them you want.Collection: Fun
I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.Collection: Responsibility
Happy hour is slightly different in the Soviet Union. There are no ice cubes or orange-peel twists in the vodka. Also, it lasts all day.Collection: War
Well the planet I've got a chance to visit is Earth, and Earth's principal features are chaos and war. I think I'd be a fool to spend years here and never have a look.Collection: War
Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.Collection: Civilization
Industrialization came to England but has since left.Collection: Industrialization
Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.Collection: Funny
Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa.Collection: Loss
Even a band of angels can turn ugly and start looting if enough angels are unemployed and hanging around the Pearly Gates convinced that all the succubi own all the liquor stores in Heaven.Collection: Angel
At Epcot Center the Disney corporation has focused its attention on two things greatly in need of Disneyfication: the tedious future and the annoying whole wide world.Collection: Funny
Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.Collection: Food
Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody? Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.Collection: Country
That happy sense of purpose people have when standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet.Collection: People
Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.Collection: Government
Whenever people tell you they are going to wipe the slate clean, it's your slate they mean to wipe.Collection: Mean
We are a nation that worships speed and power. And for good reason. Without power we would still be part of England and everybody would be out of work... Bicycles are too slow and impuissant for a nation like ours. They belong in Czechoslovakia.Collection: Would Be
When I became a man, I put away childish things and got more elaborate and expensive childish things from France and Japan.Collection: Men
Russian cars are silly. They look like imports drawn by a cartoonist for a UAW newsletter.Collection: War
There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.Collection: Funny
In the wake of Animal House, the stock briefly and quite wrongly shot up. So I love that movie.Collection: Animal
Normally, the job sucks but work is kinda fun, because you see your friends and flirt with girls and stuff.Collection: Girl
If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.Collection: Mean
I think Michael O'Donoghue felt he'd said what he wanted to say. In fact, nobody thought we could spin it out long enough to make a book.Collection: Book
Finally, one night we were smoking pot [with Michael O'Donoghue] and talking about the people that are invariably in high school, whether you go to prep school or public school or ghetto school or rich suburban school. And actually, it spun off from a Kurt Vonnegut quote.Collection: School
[Kurt] Vonnegut once said, if you ever want to know who somebody is... Like you look at Richard Nixon, or Adolf Hitler, or Ralph Nader, or anybody who seems like a difficult person to understand, and is therefore not part of the pattern of human behavior. Think about who they were in high school, and they will explain themselves to you. So we got a hold of, like, 50 high-school yearbooks, including my mom's from 1925 or something, and we discovered that they're all the same.Collection: Mom
The Harvard Lampoon itself, which had a pretty stellar run in the '60s.Collection: Running
The dominant type of humor in the '60s was essentially defensive and self-deprecating, using humor as a shield.Collection: Self