We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking P. J. O’Rourke Quotes. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
On inspection, Gaudi’s architecture isn’t whimsical at all.
I am a student of stupidity. I am a political reporter.
Guns are the ultimate bulwark against government misbehavior.
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow… he wasn’t evil or anything, but he was worthless.
The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon.
Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, ‘Where’s the art?’ They weren’t doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had… maybe I could even quit renting.
Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.
We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.
I live in rural New Hampshire, and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we’re short on people. My town has a population of 301.
Think 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.
You can’t destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America’s elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you’re doing us a favor.
Writing on a computer makes saving what’s been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.
Preachers 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.
I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.
In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase ‘hope and change,’ to wit: ‘big, fat government.’
A ‘farm’ today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall.
Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.
Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.
If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions.
Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
I’m a rather decisive type.
Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.
New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State’s registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they’re going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can’t understand what they say.
I live in New Hampshire. We’re in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I’ve got beachfront property. You tell us up there, ‘By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,’ and we say, ‘Your point is?’
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.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
As murderous industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald’s.
I’ve never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about.
If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life… it’s the magic words ‘I don’t know.’
I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh; therefore I usually don’t listen to him.
The most brilliant satire of all time was ‘A Modest Proposal’ by Jonathan Swift. You’ll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.
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.
The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.
A person has got to balance work and life and family in order to be a balanced person.
There’s one more terrifying fact about old people: I’m going to be one soon.
Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you’ve written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.
I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.
No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.
Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they’re trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.
The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them to be responsible on the various adventures they have on their way to those goals, good, bad, and otherwise.
I’m not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling.
I’ve only been to New Zealand once, about 1989. It was incredibly beautiful, kind of like the ideal of where I live in New England – all that and then some – but I can’t say I was there long enough to get any very clear idea.
The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin.
I have never been to a museum in Hong Kong, or a movie or a play. I’ve never gone club-hopping. I’ve never taken the tram to Victoria Peak.
Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He’s a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he’s such an excellent banjo player that you almost don’t wish you had a pair of wire cutters.
Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.
A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too.
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.
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.
I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom.
There are a number of Americans who shouldn’t vote. The number is 57 percent, to judge by the combined total of Clinton and Perot ballots in the 1996 presidential election.
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.
Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.
Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it’s got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It’s not pretty. But it’s striking, I’ll give it that. It’s not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.
Rahm Emanuel is, we are almost certain, a vampire.
Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
I think the Baby Boom has enjoyed itself, maybe sometimes a little too much, and we’re continuing to enjoy ourselves, maybe a little too much.
Something that confirms all fears and many conspiracy theories about government is finding out what our elected representatives would put into law if they could.
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.
Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
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.
Why can’t death – if we must have it – be always glorious, as in ‘The Iliad?’
Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.
Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
Fascism is very much a mob movement.
Term limits aren’t enough. We need jail.
Opinions of language are as interesting as opinions of arithmetic.
Detroit’s industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.
Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples.
The great apologist has to have lived large and wild. If he’s going to kiss the world’s boo-boos and make up, he’d better plant some bruises first. A master apologizer has to be a Lord Byron, a Rick in Casablanca, a Lee Atwater, anyway.
The real purpose of welfare is to get rid of poor people entirely. Everybody knows welfare has bad effects; that’s the point.
Upbeat is for people who want to feel good about their cause: the reformers, the progressives, the revolutionaries, the utopians, the collectivists, and the rest of the altruistic scum of the earth. Why do these people want to feel good? They want to feel good in order to convince themselves that they are good.
Political discourse has become so rotten that it’s no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.
A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you’re managing the U.S. Mint, buy a penny.
There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans: race and religion.
Philosophy was once considered science.
The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and health and retirement benefits working on the General Livestock Corporation assembly line putting udders on cows.
Politics is – once in a while – a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.
Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
People are always angry at America. They’re absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.
You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city – you don’t need to go to Beirut for that – but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.
We journalists don’t have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.
There’s a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn’t just go on tape cassettes and say, ‘America sucks.’ He recites poetry; he finds things that ‘America sucks’ rhymes with.
The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.
Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.
One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world – and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East – is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn’t there. It has to do with history.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.
There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation – as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed.
Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren’t honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he’s getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.
Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
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.
Everybody in America who didn’t come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.
Call a man ‘ignorant,’ and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.
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.
In a free country, government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference.
Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don’t read his first book, because they don’t read ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments.’
I like to argue with the radio.
I’m fascinated by political enthusiasm.
Never fight an inanimate object.
The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.
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.
Any terrorism is an attack on libertarian values.
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til it’s free.
The people who despise America are the editors of the ‘New Statesman.’ Their green-card applications must have been turned down.
In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City.
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
Americans are good at pursuing happiness. And the Americans who pursue happiness most diligently show that we’re also good at running it down and killing it.
Of course, no one wants to ban the vote. Voting should remain available for sporting and recreational purposes. But certain types of votes clearly should be curtailed – ‘assault votes,’ for example, in which the only purpose of the vote is to harm others.
Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help?
If ever there were a place where people not only tend not to face economic facts, but it’s almost their purpose not to face economic facts, it’s Washington.
The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.
Soldiers are not policemen, and it’s very unfair, even for those soldiers who have some police training, to burden them with police duties. It’s not what they’re trained for, or equipped for.
If we were to inspect ourselves or members of our family and our friends, we would see that we don’t really have to go all the way overseas to be mystified – we can be mystified right at home.
In thirteen years, every aspect of the universe can change – ask a thirteen-year-old.
Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.
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?
When you pay a hospital bill, you’re really paying two hospital bills – one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital. and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn’t have a job and/or insurance and can’t pay the hospital.
Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs.
There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.
Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.
I’m a political conservative.
Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.
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.
Disney’s House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war.
There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It’s going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it’s the Democrats.
I just wasn’t cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I’m more of an Irish Setter Dad.
People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it’s the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.
Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.
One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you’re not in the Army.
The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.
President Bush said that if illegal immigrants want citizenship, they’d have to do three things: pay taxes, hold meaningful jobs, and learn English. Bush doesn’t meet those qualifications.
America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
Democrats hate success.
If you want to join the Republican party, they have to let you in. There’s nothing they can do about it. I mean, if Republicans will take Al D’Amato, they’ll take anybody.
The bar is set pretty low if you want to be a hip, accessible conservative.
Global warming is a fact. Now it’s up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial importance in preventing powerful, greedy free market forces from getting in the way of worsening storms and rising sea levels. The Kyoto Accord is a good first step.
Politics won’t allow for the truth.
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.
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
Obama, in pursuit of power, has been as greedy and irresponsible as any Wall Street tycoon in pursuit of money.
America’s public schools have served their purpose. Free and compulsory education was good for a somewhat unpromising young nation.
Toledo is better than exciting, it’s happy. Because nothing is more conducive to unhappiness than taking yourself seriously, and taking yourself seriously is difficult when you’re baseball team is the Mud Hens.
Regulation creates a moral hazard.
When you’re a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, ‘Gee, I wouldn’t want to be doing that.’ They’re on your side.
I’m on Medicare now. If I go and have a big operation, it costs me nothing. It should cost me a little. I’m not rich, but I can afford a few grand if I have to have my appendix taken out. I can pitch in a little bit.
Conservatives really don’t believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don’t tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do.
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.
The subculture of felons is in great vogue among adolescents. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so forth allow us Republicans to say to America’s young people, ‘We be thugs.’ The GOP may capture the youth vote at last.
I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.
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.
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.
War diminishes both civil and economic rights.
The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay.
Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
I am unboreable in the great outdoors.
Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization – an appeal to civilization itself.
My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.
Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-’60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate.
I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.
I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block… pretty funny.
Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.
I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.
I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.
We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.
It’s better to make fun of yourself because you’ve always got someone around to make fun of, and they can’t sue you.
Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.
All religions must be made child-proof. Our teachers’ unions have done good work in this field, K through 12. Delaying first communions and bar mitzvahs until age 21 would be another positive step.
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.
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.
Voting has proliferated in the United States, and it has reached a point where there is now almost one vote available per citizen over the age of eighteen.
The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.
I believe in God. God created the world.
When I board an airplane these days, all the middle-aged men are dressed like me – when I was an 8-year-old. They’re in shorts and T-shirts. And it’s not just on airplanes. It’s in business offices, teachers’ lounges, and churches.
Obama’s space policy doesn’t differ much from George W. Bush’s.
To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt’s is a slur on the poor.
If death weren’t around to ‘finalize’ the Darwinian process, we’d all still be amoebas.
In the Soviet Union, no industry went under until they all did.
What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.
After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He’s still here in the United States.
People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.
All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.
Health care’s not about insurance! Health care’s about getting treatment.
TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.
The two most frightening words in Washington are ‘bipartisan consensus.’ Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.
For decades in America, there has been an effort to ensure that the rights of those who are not sane are the same as the rights of those who are.
People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.
The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the ’70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.
The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they’re living.
My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you’re fortunate – and both of us are – you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.
Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn’t mean you’re mad at your mailman.
I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie, you’re the Scary Dad. Never mind that no one has had an actually scary dad since 1966. The visceral fear remains.
You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.
Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you’re handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it’s over.
More modern poetry is written than read.
Moviemakers are rewarded with tax write-offs if, when seeking a location that looks like America, they seek it in America.
Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.
Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.
Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won’t dig up the pretty lawn, won’t plant anything for fear of getting dirty, and they use fragrant bath salts from The Body Shop instead of smelly compost.
The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.
The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.
My life would have gone along perfectly well, politically speaking, if it hadn’t been for girls.
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?
Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.
When I’m in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.
Love can never be fully explained.
‘You’re stupid,’ is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.
Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
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.
We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.
When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.
There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.
I don’t understand anything about America’s culture.
Politicians will talk strategy and tactics and policies and programs until they’re blue in the face, or you strangle them and they turn blue.
If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I’d claim it was forced on our country by a sinister international organization.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
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.
Democrats hate Democrats most of all.
I have no idea if some societies, anthropologically speaking, aren’t really suited for democracy. I don’t think that’s true.
Like it or not, I’ve come to appreciate soccer. Any kid can play, which fits with the inclusive agenda of progressive schools. Although the corollary to ‘any kid can play’ is that every kid must play because there is an iron grip to the warm hug of progressive inclusionism.
I don’t watch much television.
Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.
Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.
I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
In midlife, we’re as dumb as we get.
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.
All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.
The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
Liberals have invented whole college majors – psychology, sociology and women’s studies – to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault.
Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.
I think every high school student who was alert during the early ’60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives.
America is not doctrinaire. It’s hard for an American politician to come up with an ideological position that is permanently unforgivable.
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.
As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone.
Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.
