P. J. O’Rourke Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Term limits aren’t enough. We need jail.

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

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.

 

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.

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.

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?

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