Top 400 P.J. O'Rourke Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

252. “We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

253. “Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it’s the only culture anyone notices.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

254. “What would be a road hazard anywhere else, in the Third World is probably the road.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

255. “Jesse Jackson was spending time with his family, or families.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

256. “My Grandmother wouldn’t even speak the word Democrat if there were children in the room, she’d say Bastards instead.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

257. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

258. “Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley!”

— P.J. O'Rourke

259. “The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

260. “The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I’d say.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

261. “There’s not a woman in the book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by Chapter 29.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

262. “Fishing is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

263. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

264. “I didn’t see any NRA officials killing babies in Waco...”

— P.J. O'Rourke

265. “If you spend seventy-two hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

266. “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

267. “The day was warm and clear. Kids were playing soccer in the parking lots and women were sunning their babies and having their tea all over the lawns. The scene was entirely too cheery for journalism.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

268. “Germans respond well to lies. At least, they always have historically.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

269. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

270. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

271. “What use is it to endure the Dutch Rubs and Indian Rope Burns that are politics if you can’t obtain mastery over people and give them noogies back?”

— P.J. O'Rourke

272. “Vegetables are something God invented to let women get even with their children.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

273. “Never strike anyone so old, small or weak that verbal abuse would have sufficed.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

274. “Visiting Future World is like opening a Chinese fortune cookie to read, “Soon you’ll be finished with dinner.””

— P.J. O'Rourke

275. “Who, other than a crazy person, does anything besides hang up on a robo-call? Any call, any person, anywhere, under any circumstances.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

276. “Fortunately, I’m married to someone who’s a pretty excellent parent!”

— P.J. O'Rourke

277. “You don’t despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

278. “The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

279. “The Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns’n’Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance brokerin America who owns a pair of white shoes.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

280. “The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

281. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

282. “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere. I strongly support paper recycling.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

283. “Industrialization came to England but has since left.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

284. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

285. “Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

286. “You can smoke or drink on a golf course without interrupting the game, and you can take a leak – something you can’t do on a squash court and shouldn’t do in a swimming pool.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

287. “Humor is a terrific tool for explaining things, especially when what you’re explaining is frightening or dull and complicated.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

288. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

289. “Politicians are wonderful people as longa as they stay away from things they don’t understand, such as working for a living.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

290. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

291. “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

292. “Australia is not very exclusive. On the visa application they still ask if you’ve been convicted of a felony – although they are willing to give you a visa even if you haven’t been.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

293. “I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ‘learning experience.’ Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ‘learning experience.’ It makes me feel less stupid.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

294. “The American political system is like fast food – mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things and everybody wants some.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

295. “I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

296. “Haitians weren’t screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

297. “That happy sense of purpose people have when standing up for a principle they haven’t really been knocked down for yet.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

298. “Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

299. “Modern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

300. “Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.”

— P.J. O'Rourke