Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best P. J. O’Rourke Quotes. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.
2
As murderous industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald’s.
3
Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.
4
I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ‘learning experience.’ Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ‘learning experience.’ It makes me feel less stupid.
5
I’m not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling.
6
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.
7
I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, ‘Where’s the art?’ They weren’t doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had… maybe I could even quit renting.
8
When you pay a hospital bill, you’re really paying two hospital bills – one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital. and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn’t have a job and/or insurance and can’t pay the hospital.
9
I think the Baby Boom has enjoyed itself, maybe sometimes a little too much, and we’re continuing to enjoy ourselves, maybe a little too much.
10
Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
11
Rahm Emanuel is, we are almost certain, a vampire.
12
The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer’s cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.
13
We loved cars until the ’70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do.
14
In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a population density four times that of New York City.
15
Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.
16
Liberals want to live downtown. All over America – in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown – there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.
17
There is one thing women can never take away from men. We die sooner.
18
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
19
I’m really tired of virtue.
20
Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.
21
I knew Hunter Thompson since the ’70s, and I loved him, but he would wear me out as I got older.
22
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. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.
23
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.
24
I live in New Hampshire. We’re in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I’ve got beachfront property. You tell us up there, ‘By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,’ and we say, ‘Your point is?’
25
The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.
26
Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.
27
The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?
28
People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it’s the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.
29
Conservatives really don’t believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don’t tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do.
30
Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ is the family’s practice as well as its theory. Even with today’s scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree.
31
I’m on Medicare now. If I go and have a big operation, it costs me nothing. It should cost me a little. I’m not rich, but I can afford a few grand if I have to have my appendix taken out. I can pitch in a little bit.
32
I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.
33
Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.
34
Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don’t read his first book, because they don’t read ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments.’
35
The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.
36
Everybody in America who didn’t come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.
37
Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.
38
Politics is the one field you don’t age out of.
39
Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.
40
Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God’s grace.
41
The only advantage to being a middle-aged man is that when you put on a jacket and tie, you’re the Scary Dad. Never mind that no one has had an actually scary dad since 1966. The visceral fear remains.
42
The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with high wages and health and retirement benefits working on the General Livestock Corporation assembly line putting udders on cows.
43
Obama, in pursuit of power, has been as greedy and irresponsible as any Wall Street tycoon in pursuit of money.
44
One nice thing about making jokes is that you don’t have to prove them.
45
Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn’t exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.
46
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.
47
The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.
48
‘You’re stupid,’ is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.
49
Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.
50
What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text.
51
Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
52
No Americans wants to see somebody lose their house because of health bills. Their boat? Maybe. Maybe the boat. But not the house.
53
Inside every Sancho Panza there’s a Don Quixote struggling to get out.
54
America is not doctrinaire. It’s hard for an American politician to come up with an ideological position that is permanently unforgivable.
55
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.
56
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money.
57
Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.
58
I myself am a parent in a small business. Number of employees: one.
59
Guns are the ultimate bulwark against government misbehavior.
60
We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.
61
Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.
62
I usually agree with Rush Limbaugh; therefore I usually don’t listen to him.
63
Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it’s number 1,000,000,001.
64
Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you’re handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it’s over.
65
Some people think that welfare reform should have hurt Bill Clinton with black voters.
66
Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.
67
I’m a political conservative.
68
I just wasn’t cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I’m more of an Irish Setter Dad.
69
I like to argue with the radio.
70
Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.
71
If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I’d claim it was forced on our country by a sinister international organization.
72
Jeans fit the mature male one of two ways, both dirigible in nature. You make a public impression that’s either Hindenburg or Goodyear blimp.
73
The budget doesn’t have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn’t have much control over the budget.
74
Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.
75
If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.
76
Liberals consider people to be nuisances.
77
Freedom is for fun.
78
Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.
79
In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America.
80
I believe in God. God created the world.
81
China is trying to become America without democracy while America is trying to become France without cheese calories.
82
If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions.
83
People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.
84
There’s something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.
85
Raining on parades requires no skill or effort on the part of a politician.
86
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.
87
On inspection, Gaudi’s architecture isn’t whimsical at all.
88
The killjoys initiated automobile crash standards so rigorous that we can’t buy a car that hasn’t been dropped from the top of a phone pole with our whole family strapped inside.
89
The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.
90
Obama’s space policy doesn’t differ much from George W. Bush’s.
91
Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs.
92
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
93
Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
94
I’m too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom’s earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.
95
Simply because something is a populist movement doesn’t make it either good or bad.
96
There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.
97
Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.
98
Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren’t honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he’s getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.
99
There’s a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.
100
It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists – Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.
101
There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees.
102
Everybody with a gun has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, you’d be crazy not to have a gun. Though, I assure you, all the crazy people have guns, too.
103
Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
104
I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.
105
Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.
106
I read good. I was an English major.
107
You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city – you don’t need to go to Beirut for that – but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.
108
Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it’s the only culture anyone notices.
109
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
110
Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.
111
Never fight an inanimate object.
112
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
113
My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow… he wasn’t evil or anything, but he was worthless.
114
When I board an airplane these days, all the middle-aged men are dressed like me – when I was an 8-year-old. They’re in shorts and T-shirts. And it’s not just on airplanes. It’s in business offices, teachers’ lounges, and churches.
115
The subculture of felons is in great vogue among adolescents. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so forth allow us Republicans to say to America’s young people, ‘We be thugs.’ The GOP may capture the youth vote at last.
116
Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
117
There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change – or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is – certainly is one of them. But it’s low on my list.
118
Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.
119
You may be surprised to discover you’re rich, especially if you’re broke.
120
The two most frightening words in Washington are ‘bipartisan consensus.’ Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.
121
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.
122
Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.
123
Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.
124
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
125
If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it’s a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also – to do the lawn and clean the gutters.
126
If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life… it’s the magic words ‘I don’t know.’
127
Fascism is very much a mob movement.
128
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.
129
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
130
Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
131
I don’t understand anything about America’s culture.
132
Politicians will talk strategy and tactics and policies and programs until they’re blue in the face, or you strangle them and they turn blue.
133
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.
134
Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.
135
I think it’s been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.
136
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.
137
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.
138
In midlife, we’re as dumb as we get.
139
I think the Baby Boom does have a tendency to get its nose in everything. The Greatest Generation had a better tendency to leave people alone. Of course, they also had a better tendency to hate everybody’s guts.
140
My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you’re fortunate – and both of us are – you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.
141
The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.
142
When you’re a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, ‘Gee, I wouldn’t want to be doing that.’ They’re on your side.
143
Any terrorism is an attack on libertarian values.
144
Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.
145
Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.
146
The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.
147
Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.
148
I’m a rather decisive type.
149
The words ‘Space Age’ have a quaint, nostalgic tone – sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching ‘The Jetsons.’
150
You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.
151
Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.
152
The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the ’70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.
153
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til it’s free.
154
Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.
155
Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.
156
Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.
157
There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It’s going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it’s the Democrats.
158
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.
159
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.
160
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.
161
There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency, and scoreless sports ties are boring.
162
America’s grossly unfair tax system won’t lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief.
163
Politics is – once in a while – a forum for serious debate about political philosophy.
164
The 18,000 NASA employees are full of galactic talents and abilities and are ready to accomplish whatever they’re directed to do.
165
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, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.
166
Regulation creates a moral hazard.
167
When I’m in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.
168
The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke – albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.
169
Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.
170
Soldiers are not policemen, and it’s very unfair, even for those soldiers who have some police training, to burden them with police duties. It’s not what they’re trained for, or equipped for.
171
Charles McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue – by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure.
172
Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
173
Kids are disorganized.
174
Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?
175
I am unboreable in the great outdoors.
176
Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help?
177
Medical researchers don’t know much about head lice because they don’t much care. The reason that they don’t much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.
178
After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He’s still here in the United States.
179
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.
180
Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
181
Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How’d they get so rich? Because they’re free.
182
Writing is agony. I hate it.
183
After all, what is your host’s purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they’d have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
184
Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.
185
The bar is set pretty low if you want to be a hip, accessible conservative.
186
Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
187
I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.
188
More modern poetry is written than read.
189
People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it’s simply a measurement.
190
I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I’m not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.
191
The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon.
192
I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.
193
Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
194
Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
195
Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he’s admiral of the Uzbek Navy.
196
My whole family can talk. They are all car salesmen. They are all funny.
197
To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt’s is a slur on the poor.
198
Detroit’s industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.
199
Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that’s when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
200
There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.
201
I’ve got a 1990 Porsche 911. It’s just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.
202
I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with their constituents. The electorate now has instant information about what politicians have been up to.
203
Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God’s infinite mercy, a last resort.
204
I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.
205
Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
206
People say, ‘Oh, politics is so polarized today,’ and I’m thinking… ‘1861, that was polarized.’
207
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.
208
Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.
209
Moviemakers are rewarded with tax write-offs if, when seeking a location that looks like America, they seek it in America.
210
When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By ‘artistic and sensitive’ I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.
211
Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-workers and so on, but actually hate the job they do.
212
President Bush said that if illegal immigrants want citizenship, they’d have to do three things: pay taxes, hold meaningful jobs, and learn English. Bush doesn’t meet those qualifications.
213
Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that’s done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.
214
If you want to join the Republican party, they have to let you in. There’s nothing they can do about it. I mean, if Republicans will take Al D’Amato, they’ll take anybody.
215
Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
216
Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.
217
The most brilliant satire of all time was ‘A Modest Proposal’ by Jonathan Swift. You’ll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.
218
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 though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.
219
The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.
220
My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.
221
Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles.
222
Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.
223
I’ve only been to New Zealand once, about 1989. It was incredibly beautiful, kind of like the ideal of where I live in New England – all that and then some – but I can’t say I was there long enough to get any very clear idea.
224
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.
225
Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
226
Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.
227
Demolishing pretensions, especially worthy ones, is a hallmark of the baby boom.
228
I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.
229
America is a meritocracy.
230
I have never Twittered or Tweeted or even Chirped.
231
In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’
232
The poor are an especially important resource for innovation when they have the bravery and pluck to get out of the poor places in which they’re living.
233
Love can never be fully explained.
234
Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren’t present.
235
A ‘farm’ today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall.
236
Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.
237
The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.
238
Fortunately, I’m married to someone who’s a pretty excellent parent!
239
What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.
240
Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you’ve written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.
