Top 400 P.J. O'Rourke Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I try to ONLY ridicule people who’s efforts are sincere. Very little trouble has been caused in the world by insincere efforts. An occasional seduction maybe. There were very few insincere Stalinists or Nazis.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

352. “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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

354. “Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what’s good for people than people do is a swine.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

355. “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

356. “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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

358. “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

359. “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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

361. “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

362. “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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

365. “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

366. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

371. “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

372. “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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

374. “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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

379. “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

380. “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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

383. “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

384. “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

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. “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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

388. “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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

395. “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

396. “The real alternative to power of the rich is not power of the poor. It’s just plain power.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

397. “In Washington journalists can afford to live almost as well as people who work for a living.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

398. “Russian cars are silly. They look like imports drawn by a cartoonist for a UAW newsletter.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

400. “And, by the way, how come all the people who were so in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament are so opposed to unilateral protection against nukes?”

— P.J. O'Rourke