Top 400 P.J. O'Rourke Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “The Greenpeace booth at all the rock and roll shows nowadays are akin to the old sorcerers who used to stand in the middle of villages warning of danger, ‘When night wolf swallows mother moon, there will be great famine.’”

— P.J. O'Rourke

402. “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

403. “In the American political system, you’re only allowed to have real ideas if it’s absolutely guaranteed that you can’t win an election.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

404. “There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

405. “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

406. “Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

407. “Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God’s infinite mercy, a last resort.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

408. “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.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

409. “The political process consists entirely of politicians talking out of their butts.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

410. “A humorist doesn’t really do that much note-taking.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

411. “Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about “character issues.””

— P.J. O'Rourke

412. “A dugout is much superior to a conventional manufactured canoe because you can get soaking wet without bothering to capsize it.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

413. “Well the planet I’ve got a chance to visit is Earth, and Earth’s principal features are chaos and war. I think I’d be a fool to spend years here and never have a look.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

414. “Happy hour is slightly different in the Soviet Union. There are no ice cubes or orange-peel twists in the vodka. Also, it lasts all day.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

415. “I’m a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn’t stick your nose in other people’s business except to make a buck.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

416. “It had never occurred to us that the Kremlin’s new anti-booze campaign would apply to journalists. Now, that’s a human-rights violation.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

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

— P.J. O'Rourke

418. “The best way to have a good political system is to avoid politics. But political disengagement deprives us of opportunities for bitching at politicians and pushing them around. This is occasionally useful and always a pleasure. In our democracy we don’t get in trouble by trying to make politicians mad. We get in trouble by trying to make them like us. Our political system goes to hell when we want it to give us things.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

419. “I arrived in the middle of a press conference – as boring a thing to sit through if you don’t know the language as it is if you do.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

420. “The three branches of government number considerably more than three and are not, in any sense, “branches” since that would imply that there is something they are all attached to besides self-aggrandizement and our pocketbooks.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

421. “And crazy old people will be to blame for whichever spawn of Satan slithers its way into the Oval Office.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

422. “I endorse Hillary Clinton for president. She is the second-worst thing that could happen to America. Dorothy and Toto’s house fell on Hillary. I endorse her. Munchkins endorse her. Donald Trump is a flying monkey. Except that what the flying monkeys have to say – “oreoreoreo” – makes more sense than Trump’s pronouncements.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

423. “Even I realized that money was to politicians what the eucalyptus tree is to koala bears: food, water, shelter, and something to crap on.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

424. “The world’s richest man pulled Microsoft out of his butt. All Bill Gates exploited was a line of 0s and 1s as long as a piece of string. Now Microsoft employs 118,000 people. Number six on the rich list, Mark Zuckerberg, created Facebook out of less than that. All Mark had was a dumb idea that all the stupid people want to tell every stupid thing about their lives to all the other stupid people. Current net worth of the person with that dumb idea, $11.2 billion.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

425. “The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That’s all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

426. “Nor should a man necessarily hold a door for a woman, unless it is a revolving door. It’s not good manners to hold a revolving door, but it is lots of fun when other people are trapped inside.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

427. “Americans appreciate bad taste or America wouldn’t look the way America does.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

428. “A walk through an old graveyard shows our ancestors often had more dead children than we have live ones.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

429. “Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

430. “You know the Fun-Suckers. You may be married to one. The Fun-Suckers go around saying how unsafe this fun thing is and how unhealthy that fun thing is and how unfair, unjust, uncaring, insensitive, divisive, contagious, and fattening every other thing that’s fun is. The Fun-Suckers are a bit too careful, a bit too concerned, a bit too scrupulous.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

431. “The free market is the greatest repository of our freedoms. Economic freedom is the freedom we exercise most often and to the greatest extent.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

432. “The free market is not a creed or an ideology that political conservatives, libertarians, and Ayn Rand acolytes want Americans to take on faith. The free market is simply a measurement. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That’s all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

433. “Whenever I’m in the middle of conformity, surrounded by oneness of mind with people oozing concurrence on every side, I get scared. And when I find myself agreeing with everybody, too, I get terrified.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

434. “Wealth makes materialism easier to bear.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

435. “The American Rebellion,” about our founding fathers. Not till their foes were driven forth By England o’er the main – Not till the Frenchman from the North Had gone with shattered Spain; Not till the clean-swept oceans showed No hostile flag unrolled, Did they remember that they owed To Freedom – and were bold!”

— P.J. O'Rourke

436. “Politicians show no signs of even knowing the difference between negative and positive rights. Blinded by the dazzle of anything that makes them popular, they honestly may not be able to tell.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

437. “And if there’s a libertarian moment in the future it won’t be while moderates are in charge. Because there are three basic tenets to libertarianism: Liberty of the individual Dignity of the individual Responsibility of the individual And everybody hates at least one of them. This year everybody hated all of them. Liberty.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

438. “If there’s something we want, politics shouldn’t be our first resort. Politics is all taking, no making. Whatever politics provides for us will be obtained from other people. Those people won’t love us.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

439. “People are all exactly alike. There’s no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we’d be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

440. “People who work in the news media do not watch The Apprentice because of what’s been happening in the news media for a number of years, causing all of us who work in it to never want to hear the words “You’re fired” again. This was a mistake. Donald Trump, the actor who plays “Donald Trump,” appeared on The Apprentice for eleven years. At its peak, the show had 20 million viewers. And Trump is a good actor. Donald Trump is almost as good as Alec Baldwin at being Donald Trump.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

441. “Political pundits are under professional obligation to regard the obvious as being too obvious.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

442. “Everyone with any sense and experience in life would rather take his fellows one by one than in a crowd. Crowds are noisy, unreasonable and impatient. They can trample you easier than a single person can. And a crowd will never buy you lunch.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

443. “There was a terrible outbreak of “mansplaining” on the campaign trail – all of it done by a woman. Hillary Clinton was the person with the patronizing and prolix explications.”

— P.J. O'Rourke

444. “You can’t shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; 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

445. “We are endowed with a moral capacity that animals, plants, rocks-and many fervent ecologists-lack. We should not be dirty, wasteful or cruel. To do so harms others. That’s wrong. Therefore we don’t disembowel Bambi like the way coyotes do, we shoot him first.”

— P.J. O'Rourke