P. j. o'rourke quotes

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.

We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it's hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald's from a speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?

The difference between corporations and governments is governments have a monopoly on force. It's a lot easier to vote with your feet or your wallet than it is to change a government with your vote.

When are the world's political parties going to get appropriate symbols: snake, louse, jackal, ... trash can, clown face, ... dollar bill with bat wings on it?

Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.

You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. ... Government contains impure ingredients - as anybody who's looked at Congress can tell you. ... government practices deceptive advertising. And the merest glance at the federal budget is enough to convict the government of perjury, extortion, and fraud. ... in a nutshell: government should be against the law. Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.

Where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity.

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money - if a gun is held to his head.

The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you.

Haitians weren't screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is.

During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?

Collectivism doesn't work because it's based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person's "fair share" of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless.

In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.

There is only one basic human right: the right to do as you please, without causing others harm. With it comes our only basic human duty: the duty to accept the consequences of our actions.

In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word : Dentistry.

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

Political systems must love poverty-they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. And politicians in democracies benefit from destitution, too. The US has had a broad range of poverty programs for 30 years. Those programs have failed. Millions of people are still poor. And those people vote for politicians who favor keeping the poverty programs in place. There's a conspiracy theory in there somewhere.

Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.

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.

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.

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.

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.

African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.

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

You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.

Liberals have a quaint and touching faith that truth is on their side and an even quainter faith that journalists are on the side of truth.

Good manners can replace morals. It may be years before anyone knows if what you are doing is right. But if what you are doing is nice, it will be immediately evident.

I have a 10 year old at home, and she is always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says that, I say, "Honey, you're cute; that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off; that's not fair. You were born in America; that's not fair. Honey, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you.

B students work for C students - A students teach.

People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.

Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.

This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.

The Three Branches of Government: Money, Television, and Bullshit

The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.

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. ... Government is not a machine with parts; it's an organism. When does an intestine quit being an intestine and start becoming an asshole?

Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you've half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're doing a hundred miles an hour in a suburban side street.

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

We had a choice between Democrats who couldn't learn from the past and Republicans who couldn't stop living in it.

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

A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It's a promissory note that doesn't actually promise anything. It's not backed by gold or silver.

The motorcycle is a device created by the team of God and Darwin to rid the world of useless young males.

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.

Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free - indeed, sanctimonious - way for "progressives" to be racists.

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

The Democrats said, "We don't know what's wrong with America, but we can fix it." The Republicans said, "There's nothing wrong with America, and we can fix that."

Satan probably wouldn't have talked so big if God had been his wife.

Liberalism is just Communism sold by the drink.

Feminism is the result of a few ignorant and literal-minded women letting the cat out of the bag about which is the superior sex. Once women made it public that they could do things better than men, they were, of course, forced to do them.

Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay your taxes, you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot. ... Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, 'Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?'

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.

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

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.

Although computer-generated artificial intelligence eludes us, artificial stupidity has been perfected.

Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.

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

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.

No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

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.

The poor of the world cannot be made rich by the redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape.

Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty.

When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it is (certain body parts excepted) done away with. But a public entity gets bigger.

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

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.

Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.

Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.

Never wear anything that panics the cat.

The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.

Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow ... It is impossible to be alive and safe.

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.

Whatever the occasion, do not neglect alcohol. No other refreshment will do. Yes, alcohol kills brain cells, but it's very selective. It only kills the brain cells that contain good sense, shame, embarrassment, and restraint.

A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something brussel sprouts never do.

Most of the people who have grabbed hold of climate change and greenhouse gases, pollution, oil dependency - they have another motive, and their motive is to attain the appearance of virtue without having actually done anything virtuous.

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.

Some women want the strong silent type, so they can tell him to shut up and rearrange the furniture.

There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.

The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know.

You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity.

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.

The preamble to the Constitution states: "We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare..." It doesn't say "guarantee the general welfare." And it certainly doesn't say "give welfare benefits to all the people in the country who aren't doing so well even if the reason they aren't doing so well is because they're sitting on their butts in front of the TV".

We're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?

I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.

Government conspiracy? They can't even deliver our mail and it's got our address on it and everything!

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."

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?"

In the end we beat them with Levi's 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system...has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes. Now they're lunch, and we're number one on the planet.

So-called Western Civilization, as practised in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western civilization not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to. Our civilization is the first in history to show even the slightest concern for average, undistinguished, none-too-commendable people like us.

There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable. They still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.

The collegiate idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.

It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China's one-child policy or America's one-parent policy.

To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

Think about last time you were broke ... now how well did it go with spending your way out of it? Did that work?

The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors--psychology, sociology, women's studies--to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.

I rarely meet a politician that I don't like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.

If I give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods, I can add ten years to my life. Trouble is, I'll add it to the wrong end.

Smoking crack is a way for people who couldn't afford college to study the works of Charles Darwin.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I've got beachfront property. You tell us up there, "By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater," and we say, "Your point is?"

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

It is easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite pet. People like pets to possess the same qualities they do. Cats are irresponsible and recognize no authority, yet are completely dependent on others for their material needs. Cats cannot be made to do anything useful. Cats are mean for the fun of it. In fact, cats possess so many of the same qualities as people that it is often hard to tell the people and the cats apart.

Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.

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.

And worrying is less work than doing something to fix the worry. This is especially true if we're careful to pick the biggest possible problems to worry about. Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody want to help Mom do the dishes.

Politics is the art of achieving prestige and power without merit.

You can't get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism.

When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

With Epcot Center, the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of make-believe that's worse than regular life.

A politician who commends himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to do good with other peoples' money.

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you've got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags.

If we're free to do what we want, why does government always have a plan for us?

We'll run this planet as we please, and if you don't like it, go back where we came from.

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race

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

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.

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

It was Ronald Reagan who used to say that the 10 most frightening words in the English language are, "I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help."

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.