P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

“Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”

“Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.”

“Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.”

“Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”

“The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.”

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

“Age and guile beat youth, innocence and a bad haircut.”

“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”

“Never fight an inanimate object.”

“Never wear anything that panics the cat.”

“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.”

“The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look.”

“Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.”

“All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.”

“The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.”

“Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilisation.”

“Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.”

“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.”

“By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba.”

“I come from Toledo, Ohio. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.”

“It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists: Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments.”

“Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.”

“The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods.”

“Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, synecdoche, metonymy, the whole bag of tricks.”

“The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It's a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.”