Quotes from P. J. O'Rourke

Moviemakers are rewarded with tax write-offs if, when seeking a location that looks like America, they seek it in America.

The Tea Party has definitely increased political involvement, not only among Tea Party members but among people who oppose the Tea Party members. It's been a general stimulus.

The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can't do, shouldn't do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.

The collegiate idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.

With Epcot Center, the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of make-believe that's worse than regular life.

All previous populist movements were demanding things from governments, whereas the Tea Party is saying, 'Give us less, go away.' That's heartening to see.

On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all.

A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you're managing the U.S. Mint, buy a penny.

The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry - knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission.

There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.

No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.

When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.

Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.

Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.

No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.

War diminishes both civil and economic rights.

Kids are disorganized.

Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.

The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.

There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans: race and religion.

If ever there were a place where people not only tend not to face economic facts, but it's almost their purpose not to face economic facts, it's Washington.

There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.

The sport of skiing consists of wearing three thousand dollars worth of clothes and equipment and driving two hundred miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and get drunk.