Patrick Jake O’Rourke is an American political satirist and journalist. O’Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic. These P. J. O’Rourke Quotes will motivate you.
Best P. J. O’Rourke Quotes
- “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Poverty can’t be eliminated by punishing people who’ve escaped poverty.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Ideology, politics, and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors–psychology, sociology, women’s studies–to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you’d have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “I have a 10-year-old at home, and she is always saying, ‘That’s not fair.’ When she says that, I say, “Honey, you’re cute; that’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off; that’s not fair. You were born in America; that’s not fair. Honey, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “My Grandmother wouldn’t even speak the word Democrat if there were children in the room, she’d say Bastards instead.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
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“The Three Branches of Government: Money, Television, and Bullshit” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China’s one-child policy or America’s one-parent policy.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it’s hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald’s from a speeding train. And we’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “A politician who commends himself as ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to do good with other peoples’ money.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “You can’t get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That’s all you need to know about communism.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
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“Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “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.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “The preamble to the Constitution states: “We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare…” It doesn’t say “guarantee the general welfare.” And it certainly doesn’t say “give welfare benefits to all the people in the country who aren’t doing so well even if the reason they aren’t doing so well is because they’re sitting on their butts in front of the TV”.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “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.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
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“People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Government conspiracy? They can’t even deliver our mail and it’s got our address on it and everything!” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “In comparative terms, there’s no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Most of the people who have grabbed hold of climate change and greenhouse gases, pollution, oil dependency – they have another motive, and their motive is to attain the appearance of virtue without having actually done anything virtuous.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word: Dentistry.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
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“Term limits aren’t enough. We need jail.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “The poor of the world cannot be made rich by the redistribution of wealth. Poverty can’t be eliminated by punishing people who’ve escaped poverty, taking their money, and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “America is the world’s policeman, all right — a big, dumb, mick flatfoot in the middle of the one thing cops dread most, a “domestic disturbance.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “If libertarianism were easy to explain, and it wasn’t easy to exaggerate the effects of libertarianism, I think it would have been done already. Many many very intelligent people have applied themselves to crafting an agenda that people could grab ahold of. But the problem of course is that libertarianism isn’t political. It is kind of anti-political. It wants to take a lot of things out of the political arena.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
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“Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “It is easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America’s favorite pet. People like pets to possess the same qualities they do. Cats are irresponsible and recognize no authority, yet are completely dependent on others for their material needs. Cats cannot be made to do anything useful. Cats are mean for the fun of it. In fact, cats possess so many of the same qualities as people that it is often hard to tell the people and the cats apart.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Fretting about overpopulation is a perfect guilt-free – indeed, sanctimonious – way for “progressives” to be racists.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you’re rich.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “I can understand why mankind hasn’t given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners – two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
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“Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don’t know.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “We’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle-deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
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“When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights – the “right” to education, the “right” to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “In our brief national history, we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one, and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don’t think that way. We don’t think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you’ve got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about “character issues.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
