Top 400 P.J. O'Rourke Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “If Disney still wants to make Epcot Center futuristic, they could do so by blowing the place up with an atom bomb.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

302. “This is the most elaborate and luxurious method of convincing others that you can cook. Take everybody out on your yacht until they’re green in the face. Then you can rave for weeks about your sauce marinara and no one will gainsay you...”

— P.J. O'Rourke

303. “Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they’ve got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

304. “Rich white Protestant men have held on to some measure of power in America almost solely by getting women, blacks, and other disadvantaged groups to wear crippling foot fashions. This keeps them too busy with corns and bunions to compete in the job market.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

305. “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

306. “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

307. “Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

308. “I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

309. “I’ve always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He’d have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

310. “Satan probably wouldn’t have talked so big if God had been his wife.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

311. “Everybody in 15th century Spain was wrong about where China was and as a result, Columbus discovered Caribbean vacations.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

312. “That is the really great thing about being an adult male, once you get married and have children the whole decision-making process is taken out of your hands, and I for one am extremely grateful.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

313. “How much fame, money and power does a woman have to achieve on her own before you can punch her in the face?”

— P.J. O'Rourke

314. “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

315. “One of these suburbs is actually named Stalingrad, which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

316. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

317. “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

318. “Because of their cuisine, Germans don’t consider farting rude. They’d certainly be out of luck if they did.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

319. “The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

320. “I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

321. “The average IQ in America is – and this can be proven mathematically – average.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

322. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

323. “In theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

324. “I’m a political conservative.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

325. “What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

326. “One thing talk can’t accomplish is communication. This is because everybody’s talking too much to pay attention to what anyone is saying.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

327. “I’m here as a radio journalist but am not even sure which part of a tape recorder takes the pictures.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

328. “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

329. “Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

330. “Satire doesn’t effect change.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

331. “Humans have trouble with economics, as you may have noticed, and not just because economic circumstances sometimes cause them to starve. Humans seem to have an innate inability to pay attention to economic principles.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

332. “Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

333. “I’ve been a New Yorker for ten years, and the only people who are nice to us turn out to be Moonies.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

334. “These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

335. “The only time a bachelor’s bed is made is when it’s in the factory.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

336. “When a couple decides to divorce, they should inform both sets of parents before having a party and telling all their friends. This is not only courteous but practical. Parents may be very willing to pitch in with comments, criticism, and malicious gossip of their own to help the divorce along.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

337. “Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

338. “The sky was so clear that the starlight cast shadows, and so many sparkles and glitters and glints appeared above us that it looked like something really expensive had been dropped and shattered in heaven – God’s Steuben ashtray, maybe.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

339. “Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

340. “The Italians have had 2,000 years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place!”

— P.J. O'Rourke

341. “Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

342. “A world government run by the UN will be like getting an old, purblind, half-deaf substitute teacher.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

343. “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

344. “Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

345. “If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the pverty, not the difference. Wealth is good.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

346. “No government proposal more complicated than “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private” ever works.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

347. “When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn’t have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

348. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

349. “Nothing bad is going to happen to us. If we get fired, it’s not failure; its a midlife vocational reassessment.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

350. “If the wind is blowing like stink and everything is working right, a twelve-meter sailboat can go eleven and a half or twelve miles an hour, the same speed at which a bond lawyer runs around the Cental Park Reservoir.”

— P.J. O'Rourke