Quotes About P. J. O'Rourke

A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something brussel sprouts never do.

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

Imagine having journalists in your own home and not even covering the furniture with plastic sheets first.

If Disney still wants to make Epcot Center futuristic, they could do so by blowing the place up with an atom bomb.

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

I think it's always easy to be sympathetic to parts of the government in detail; in their concrete manifestations. Because obviously, we don't have government for no reason.

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

TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.

Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.

In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'

Jesse Jackson was spending time with his family, or families.

I was never in the office [of Rolling Stone]. It was very different from Lampoon, where we spent a lot of time together socially, which is to say "drunk."

A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.

Demolishing pretensions, especially worthy ones, is a hallmark of the baby boom.

I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.

The one thing that's terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.

Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.

Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.

'You're stupid,' is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.

Writing is agony. I hate it.

I think every high school student who was alert during the early '60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.

I can think of a number of areas in New York where three acres of nuclear waste would make the neighborhood safer to walk around in than it is now, and better lit.

Liberals have a quaint and touching faith that truth is on their side and an even quainter faith that journalists are on the side of truth.