Quotes from P. J. O'Rourke

There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency, and scoreless sports ties are boring.

Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.

All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.

As a longtime former resident of 15 years in Washington, I wish that everybody would stay off the Mall with their political cause so that we can get out there, you know, and play flag football or Frisbee, or walk the dog or something - you know, which is, you know, what the National Mall should be for, in my personal opinion.

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.

Disney's House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war.

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

More modern poetry is written than read.

Of all the American educational system's problems, none is more severe than the academic year beginning before Labor Day.

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.

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

Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.

People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.

All lies are told with a straight face. It is truth that's said with a dismissive giggle.

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.

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.

There was an austerely dignified award ceremony. By that I mean we had to buy our own drinks - in clear violation of the international journalists'code of truth, fairness and an open bar.

The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin.

A deadly sins addendum is long overdue. Life has changed since Pope Gregory the Great scribbled his initial list in the sixth century.

Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.

Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician.

I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.

Jack Abramoff is the world's best lobbyist - for the Federal Penitentiary System.

Even Jimmy Carter can't be wrong all the time.