Top 1016 Quotes & Sayings by P. J. O'Rourke - Page 17

Everybody in 15th century Spain was wrong about where China was and as a result, Columbus discovered Caribbean vacations.

Greatest generation came through some stuff that we can't even imagine - the Depression, World War I - and all they wanted after that was a breather and a calm and a quiet life, and they get us.

Commies love concrete.

There is a fine line in the Third World between half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe and half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe so they can throw you in jail.

Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer.

I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.

Dating is the social engagement with the threat of sex at its conclusion.

I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.

At Epcot Center the Disney corporation has focused its attention on two things greatly in need of Disneyfication: the tedious future and the annoying whole wide world.

Long conversations with pals when neither you nor they have had a drink can be a test of palship.

In England, all the English car companies were beginning to circle the drain in a series of well-deserved failures and bankruptcies, earned by making lousy products with very poor production at high prices. So, the government, back in the '70s, nationalized all the British car companies. The result was British Leyland, a name that perhaps doesn't resonate much with you.

The American political system is like fast food - mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things and everybody wants some.

Getting down on all fours and imitating a rhinoceros stops babies from crying. (Put an empty cigarette pack on your nose for a horn and make loud "snort" noises.) I don't know why parents don't do this more often. Usually it makes the kid laugh. Sometimes it sends him into shock. Either way it quiets him down. If you're a parent, acting like a rhino has another advantage. Keep it up until the kid is a teenager and he definitely won't have his friends hanging around your house all the time.

We should never hesitate to listen to a fool about life because life is pretty foolish as far as I can tell.

Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. And everything that isn't fun is dangerous too. It's impossible to be alive and safe.

It is important to remember when making jokes about women, that they are not a minority. They weren't captured on another continent and brought here in leg-irons (funny shoes, yes, but not leg-irons) and Hitler didn't blame them for Germany's loss in WWI. Therefore, you can make any kind of fun of them you want.

What use is it to endure the Dutch Rubs and Indian Rope Burns that are politics if you can't obtain mastery over people and give them noogies back?

Anything that makes your mother cry is fun

The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn't occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn't go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.

The old woman was not only ugly with the ugliness age brings us all but showed signs of formidable ugliness by birth - pickle-jar chin, mainsail ears and a nose like a trigonometry problem. What's more, she had the deep frown and snit wrinkles that come from a lifetime of bad character.

Zen martini: A martini with no vermouth at all. And no gin, either.

Thanksgiving is so called because we are all so thankful that it only comes once a year.

A good bachelor drinks his dessert (and sometimes the rest of his meals). A sweet tooth is a danger signal that you're getting too much exercise and not enough cocktails.

The wise traveler [to Beirut] will pack shirts or blouses with ample breast pockets. Reaching inside a jacket for your passport looks too much like going for the draw and puts armed men out of countinence

That happy sense of purpose people have when standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet.

I'm 61 years old. I'm not that fearful of the future, period. I'm not going to see that much of it.

I am a great admirer of women.

Who does Bill Clinton think got off the boat and stepped on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers?

If you get outside the world of show business and its satellites, there's a whole world of car nuts in the Los Angeles area.

Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.

Smoking cigarettes seems to alarm peace activists much more than voting for Reagan does.

Last year, on a long car trip, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh shout. I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh; therefore I usually don't listen to him. I listen to NPR: "World to end-poor and minorities hardest hit." I like to argue with the radio.

You can't get something for nothing. Everybody remembers this except politicians.

You can keep the dining room clean by eating in the kitchen.

Visiting Future World is like opening a Chinese fortune cookie to read, "Soon you'll be finished with dinner."

God has no role to play in politics except to make sure politicians go where they belong. To hell.

If Disney still wants to make Epcot Center futuristic, they could do so by blowing the place up with an atom bomb.

There's no telling what might have happened to our defense budget if Saddam Hussein hadn't invaded Kuwait that August and set everyone gearing up for World War II. Can we count on Saddam Hussein to come along every year and resolve our defense-policy debates? Given the history of the Middle East, it's possible.

There's nothing inherently lame about electricity. I've got a basement full of power tools that all operate with electricity, and they're manly items. And when you see a great big locomotive hauling a mile of freight cars, that's a hybrid. A lot of people don't understand that.

Writing this book required an enormous amount of help from friends. To them goes the credit. I'll take the money.

I'll pick "I'm kidding" anytime over "I'm lying."

Children from the age of five to ten should watch more television. Television depicts adults as rotten SOB's given to fistfights, gunplay, and other mayhem. Kids who believe this about grownups aren't likely to argue about bedtime.

Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection.

I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.

I spent almost 25 years as a foreign correspondent, and the world's primary problem is poverty.

There are lots of levels of fear and complaint about the government getting involved in business. First and foremost, of course, is incompetence.

Los Angeles is many places in one place.

We're gonna be in a world of hurt if we don't get it fixed, because there's going to be billions of people out there - they're hungry, they're mad. One thing that they can get their hands on is guns.

Whenever people tell you they are going to wipe the slate clean, it's your slate they mean to wipe.

Mankind is supposed to have evolved in the treetops. But I have examined my sense of balance, the prehensility of my various appendages, and my attitude toward standing on anything higher than, say, political principles, and I have concluded that, personally, I evolved in the backseat of a car.

It's much better to have your arguments dismissed because you might be joking than to have your arguments dismissed because you're not telling the truth.

Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations.

Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite poet. People like poets to possess the same qualities they do.

Walt is dead. And, after a couple of hours at Epcot, you'll wish you were, too.

Gambling is so pervasive in Nevada that maybe the state should just go the whole hog. There'd be gum machines that dispensed chewing tobacco if you lost. You could gamble for the toilet paper in public bathroom stalls. And fill out Keno cards in an attempt to win cancer therapy at the hospital.

The typical old-fashioned diet (in the nineteenth century) was so bad it almost assembled modern dieting.