P. J. O'Rourke

Comedian

1947-11-14

Quotes by P. J. O'Rourke

• People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.

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• I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.

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• The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.

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• Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.

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• America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God.

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• Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization - an appeal to civilization itself.

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• Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.

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

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

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• Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.

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• The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

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• 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.

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• The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.

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• A 'farm' today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall.

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• We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.

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• I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.

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• The people who despise America are the editors of the 'New Statesman.' Their green-card applications must have been turned down.

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• Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.

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• Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.

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• I've got a 1990 Porsche 911. It's just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.

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