Top 1016 Quotes & Sayings by P. J. O'Rourke - Page 15

East Germany was so total in its totalitarianism that everything was banned which wasn't compulsory.

Political stuff is all about his [Hunter S. Thompson] reaction to a situation. And my stuff is much more externally driven.

The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.

In Japan people drive on the left. In China people drive on the right. In Vietnam it doesn't matter.

Then basically what was happening was that it was the middle '80s, and Rolling Stone realized that a lot of their readers had voted for [Ronald] Reagan, and they were going, "Gosh! We need a Republican! Does anybody know a Republican? Wait a minute! I think P.J.'s a Republican!"

What about snipers?" I once asked someone. He said, "Oh, most of the snipers have automatic weapon. They arent very accurate.

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look.

I was never in the office [of Rolling Stone]. It was very different from Lampoon, where we spent a lot of time together socially, which is to say "drunk."

War will exist as long as there's a food chain.

You start out with Mad magazine, and you go right through the sort of black humor of Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Paul Krassner... If you put Lenny together with Mad magazine and run it through the brain of a college student, you get National Lampoon.

I think Michael O'Donoghue felt he'd said what he wanted to say. In fact, nobody thought we could spin it out long enough to make a book.

I always thought there was some romance to that '30s leftist stuff, even though I'm a Republican.

Fishing... is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.

Lampoon was exactly the opposite. The work was a lot of fun, but the office environment was hell. You cannot put 20 humorists together.

Self-interest leads to honing your skills, the better to trade with.

Especially with a magazine like Lampoon, which was very dependent on newsstand sales. Our readers didn't usually occupy the same address long enough to get a subscription, because they were in college, or they were hippies. So it was very up-and-down, and we had to calculate how many to print, which was always sort of a headache from a business point of view.

The U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner's manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world's most unruly, passionate and energetic people safe, prosperous and free.

In the wake of Animal House, the stock briefly and quite wrongly shot up. So I love that movie.

I have three children and three dogs. You put them in a Prius, you know? People who have a Prius obviously have no life! No wife, no kids, no pets - there's no room in there for anything!

[Al] Franken is left-wing and funny. He's a pretty good political humorist.

Because of their cuisine, Germans don't consider farting rude. They'd certainly be out of luck if they did.

Whereas Rolling Stone, I just never had anything to do with them. I'd stop by the office maybe twice a year.

Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.

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.

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."

The Russians could have some (warheads) aimed at Japan, so if we act up they can destroy our economy.

As a result of that, and as a result of friendship, I don't think we've ever been competitive. I mean, there's probably a very good reason Hunter [S. Thompson] isn't jealous of me.

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of defense.

[Michael] Moore doesn't really use his sense of humor that much.

Rich parents are famous both for miserliness and astonishing longevity. And, when they finally do die, you'll find they've left their estate in inviolate trust to the golden retrievers.

Every generation finds the drug it needs.

I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now. You've probably never woken up early on a winter morning to the acid stink of coal smoke in the air, which was everywhere when I was a little kid. My grade school was heated with coal. Not only was coal used to generate electricity, it was without any scrubbers in the stacks.

Lampoon was a very collegial operation, though "collegial" usually means "friendly" and it wasn't that friendly. But we were tight, like a family.

To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage Weltscbmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?

If you're doing a column, you kind of have to. Like in the back of Sports Illustrated, Rick Reilly has to find something to be mad about. It's not really the way I approach things.

We like to pile language on language. Hunter [ S. Thompson] was an influence on me, no doubt about it.

From National Lampoon, you go directly to Saturday Night Live, because it's a lot of the same people.

The dominant type of humor in the '60s was essentially defensive and self-deprecating, using humor as a shield.

Normally, the job sucks but work is kinda fun, because you see your friends and flirt with girls and stuff.

When I get in deep water, I prefer to announce that I'm in over my head.

On Michael Moore TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.

I like to take things that are boring-but-important and try to make them interesting. That was definitely what I was after with Eat The Rich.

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.

I've been a New Yorker for ten years, and the only people who are nice to us turn out to be Moonies.

In the Third World, honk your horn only under the following circumstances: 1. When anything blocks the road. 2. When anything doesn't. 3. When anything might. 4. At red lights. 5. At green lights. 6. At all other times.

Then Saturday Night Live spawns... well, everything right down to American Pie 9, where all humor has to be irrelevant, which can get a little tiring.

Pollution is a problem, and there's the whole problem of the spoiling of the commons, but we've addressed the pollution problem on a variety of different levels in a variety of ways, and it's worked pretty well.

The Harvard Lampoon itself, which had a pretty stellar run in the '60s.

The Italians have had 2,000 years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place!

[Kurt] Vonnegut once said, if you ever want to know who somebody is... Like you look at Richard Nixon, or Adolf Hitler, or Ralph Nader, or anybody who seems like a difficult person to understand, and is therefore not part of the pattern of human behavior. Think about who they were in high school, and they will explain themselves to you. So we got a hold of, like, 50 high-school yearbooks, including my mom's from 1925 or something, and we discovered that they're all the same.

Michael O'Donoghue was a very close friend of mine - very encouraging with my stuff, and really a great guy - but he was a no-kidding difficult person.

Lampoon ran out of steam in the early '80s, and wasn't able to reinvent itself because it ran out of talent. People who wanted to do this kind of stuff could suddenly make $100,000 in Hollywood right out of college.

When I left the Lampoon, I went west to try that out, and discovered that I hated it.They were awful people turning out awful product .

Finally, one night we were smoking pot [with Michael O'Donoghue] and talking about the people that are invariably in high school, whether you go to prep school or public school or ghetto school or rich suburban school. And actually, it spun off from a Kurt Vonnegut quote.

Germans respond well to lies. At least, they always have historically.

The real truth about children is they don't speak the language very well. They're physically uncoordinated. And they are ignorant of our elaborate ideas about right and wrong.

Apparently Bolivia is the key source of lithium in the world. So we're gonna trade the Saudis for the Bolivians.

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?

I was managing editor for a while [in National Lampoon ], and it does cause business problems when your circulation goes up.