Quotes from 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.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.

Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.

Americans are good at pursuing happiness. And the Americans who pursue happiness most diligently show that we're also good at running it down and killing it.

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.

Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.

The purpose of sports - even foreign sports - is not to bore people.

As a former writer for the 'National Lampoon,' I've probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.

Politics is - once in a while - a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.

The foundation of collectivism is simple: There should be no important economic differences among people. No one should be too rich.

China is trying to become America without democracy while America is trying to become France without cheese calories.

In a free country, government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference.

The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.

Love can never be fully explained.

Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.

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.

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.

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.

Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.

The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?

A world government run by the UN will be like getting an old, purblind, half-deaf substitute teacher.

If I give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods, I can add ten years to my life. Trouble is, I'll add it to the wrong end.

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.