Quotes from P. J. O'Rourke

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

Although computer-generated artificial intelligence eludes us, artificial stupidity has been perfected.

Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box.

Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.

You're never going to read 'The Wealth of Nations,' and you shouldn't, really. It's 900 pages.

Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.

The idea of a world where all people are alike - in wealth or in anything else - is a fantasy for the stupid.

The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they've shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative.

I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper.

Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.

Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.

America is not doctrinaire. It's hard for an American politician to come up with an ideological position that is permanently unforgivable.

Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?

Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.

The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.

People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.

In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City.

I live in rural New Hampshire, and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we're short on people. My town has a population of 301.

Simply because something is a populist movement doesn't make it either good or bad.

The prevalence of mobile homes does not correspond with the prevalence of poverty, or with much of anything else. All that can be confidently said about America's mobile homes is that they are massed in places where you wouldn't want to be in one. Florida's mobile homes lie athwart the path of hurricanes. Georgia's are in the way of tornadoes.

To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt's is a slur on the poor.

Philosophy was once considered science.

There are selves too big for one person to contain. You cannot call them selfish. There is nothing -ish about such selves. They are the self, as it were, itself.