Top 1016 Quotes & Sayings by P. J. O'Rourke

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American comedian P. J. O'Rourke.

Last updated on September 9, 2024.

Patrick Jake O'Rourke was an American libertarian political satirist and journalist. O'Rourke was the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He was a columnist at The Daily Beast from 2011 to 2016.

American - Comedian | Born: November 14, 1947

Source: Wikipedia

The First Amendment only says 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' It can disrespect all it wants.

P. J. O'Rourke

The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.

P. J. O'Rourke

Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.

P. J. O'Rourke

The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.

P. J. O'Rourke

You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.

P. J. O'Rourke

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.

P. J. O'Rourke

Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.

P. J. O'Rourke

Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.

P. J. O'Rourke

Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

P. J. O'Rourke

In the Soviet Union, no industry went under until they all did.

P. J. O'Rourke

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

P. J. O'Rourke

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

P. J. O'Rourke

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.

P. J. O'Rourke

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

P. J. O'Rourke

Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.

P. J. O'Rourke

There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.

P. J. O'Rourke

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.

P. J. O'Rourke

In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me.

P. J. O'Rourke

The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer's cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.

P. J. O'Rourke

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

P. J. O'Rourke

I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.

P. J. O'Rourke

The two most frightening words in Washington are 'bipartisan consensus.' Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.

P. J. O'Rourke

There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.

P. J. O'Rourke

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

P. J. O'Rourke

Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.

P. J. O'Rourke

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

P. J. O'Rourke

Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God's grace.

P. J. O'Rourke

A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.

P. J. O'Rourke

Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.

P. J. O'Rourke

Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it.

P. J. O'Rourke

A friend of mine at the American Enterprise Institute says there are two parties: the silly party and the stupid party. I'm too old for the silly party, so I had to join the stupid party.

P. J. O'Rourke

Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree.

P. J. O'Rourke

Rich people don't like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don't go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.

P. J. O'Rourke

Never fight an inanimate object.

P. J. O'Rourke

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.

P. J. O'Rourke

Everybody with a gun has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, you'd be crazy not to have a gun. Though, I assure you, all the crazy people have guns, too.

P. J. O'Rourke

If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat - in other words, turn you into an adult.

P. J. O'Rourke

Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca's day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real-estate developments.

P. J. O'Rourke

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

P. J. O'Rourke

Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.

P. J. O'Rourke

The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.

P. J. O'Rourke

Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.

P. J. O'Rourke

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.

P. J. O'Rourke

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

P. J. O'Rourke

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

P. J. O'Rourke

Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.

P. J. O'Rourke

The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.

P. J. O'Rourke

Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware.

P. J. O'Rourke

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

P. J. O'Rourke

The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

P. J. O'Rourke

By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.

P. J. O'Rourke

When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.

P. J. O'Rourke

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

P. J. O'Rourke

Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.

P. J. O'Rourke

Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.

P. J. O'Rourke

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.

P. J. O'Rourke

Never wear anything that panics the cat.

P. J. O'Rourke

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.

P. J. O'Rourke

If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.

P. J. O'Rourke

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.

P. J. O'Rourke