Top 400 P.J. O'Rourke Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “A world government run by the UN will be like getting an old, purblind, half-deaf substitute teacher.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

352. “I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners – Stalin, for example – must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

353. “So what if I don’t agree with the Democrats? What’s to disagree with? They believe everything. And what they don’t believe, the Republicans do. Neither of them stands for anything they believe in, anyway.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

357. “Fashionably amusing table manners are a matter of breaking the right rule at the right time.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

358. “The question nowadays is not what makes government work. The question is how do we make it stop.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

359. “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

360. “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

361. “I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

362. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

363. “Some people are better imagined in one’s bed than found there in the morning.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

364. “How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

365. “Some jobs are worse than actual wives. Ad agency vs. Matrimony, for instance: Even the most capricious and demanding spouse is not going to divorce you for refusing to spend forty hours a week making up lies about toilet paper.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

366. “Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay’s a lot worse.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

367. “There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

368. “In the past a man was expected to give his seat on a bus to a woman. Today it would be much more courteous for that man to give her his job.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

369. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

370. “If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

371. “The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society’s ills can be cured politically. It’s like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

372. “There’s something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

373. “I read good. I was an English major.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

374. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

375. “Long conversations with pals when neither you nor they have had a drink can be a test of palship.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

376. “I can think of a number of areas in New York where three acres of nuclear waste would make the neighborhood safer to walk around in than it is now, and better lit.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

377. “People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don’t need politics, they have jobs.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

378. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

379. “I was told to hand over my disposable lighter, to prevent, I suppose, any threat of “Do what I say or I’ll light this Marlboro and you’ll all die – in thirty years due to inhalation of secondhand smoke.””

— P.J. O'Rourke

380. “It’s the squares who know how to fly the fighter planes and operate the missiles and the bombs and work the M-16s. Liberals would still be fumbling with the federally mandated trigger locks.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

381. “Jewishness cropped up and has never successfully been put down since.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

382. “Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

383. “If we do our deficit spending on weapons, at least we get weapons. Then if we need weapons, we have them. If we don’t need them, no harm is done.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

384. “Cats possess so many of the same qualities as some poeple that it is often hard to tell the people and the cats apart.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

385. “I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

386. “I’m a member of the working press; you’d think I’d know better than to listen to journalists.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

387. “Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

388. “Then there’s politics. Just imagine politics with its dumbbell element subtracted. There would be no Republican candidates. There would be no Democratic voters. The whole system would collapse.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

389. “Imagine having journalists in your own home and not even covering the furniture with plastic sheets first.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

390. “Remember, your body needs 6 to 8 glasses of fluid daily. Straight up or on the rocks.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

391. “War will exist as long as there’s a food chain.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

392. “Dates used to be made days or even weeks in advance. Now dates tend to be made the day after. That is, you get a phone call from someone who says, “If anyone asks, I was out to dinner with you last night, okay?””

— P.J. O'Rourke

393. “There’s one more terrifying fact about old people: I’m going to be one soon.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

394. “America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

395. “Children from the age of five to ten should watch more television. Television depicts adults as rotten SOB’s given to fistfights, gunplay, and other mayhem. Kids who believe this about grownups aren’t likely to argue about bedtime.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

396. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

397. “Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation’s capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

398. “Anyhow, all mankind’s ideas and interests, all human aims and motives, are exhibited, fully formed, in a three-year-old child. The kid is just operating on a smaller scale and lacks the advantage of having made enormous soft-money campaign contributions to political candidates.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

399. “A girl who is really pretty – whether she wraps herself in an abayah, a nun’s habit, or the front hall rug – never wraps herself so that the world can’t tell.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

400. “Anybody who’s having fun at an Elk Lodge meeting has the fun thing figured out.”

— P.J. O'Rourke