P. J. O'Rourke

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.

The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.

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

I'm not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling.

If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.

I knew Hunter Thompson since the '70s, and I loved him, but he would wear me out as I got older.

Upbeat is for people who want to feel good about their cause: the reformers, the progressives, the revolutionaries, the utopians, the collectivists, and the rest of the altruistic scum of the earth. Why do these people want to feel good? They want to feel good in order to convince themselves that they are good.

Marijuana is self punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive and in this world what worse punishment could there be

Northwest Ohio is flat. There isn't much up. The land is so flat that a child from Toledo is under the impression that the direction hills go is down. Sledding is done down from street level into creek beds and road cuts.

I don't even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I've never used a computer.

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.'

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

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.

Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.

The words 'Space Age' have a quaint, nostalgic tone - sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching 'The Jetsons.'

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.

Vegetables are something God invented to let women get even with their children.

Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they're right.

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.

Philosophy was once considered science.

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.

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.

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

We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scutter.

What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt.

Call a man 'ignorant,' and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.

There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.

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.

Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.

Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.

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.

Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.

Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.

The most futuristic aspect of the House of the Future was that it was made almost entirely of plastic.

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.

Fortunately, I'm married to someone who's a pretty excellent parent!

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.

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.

The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.

I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.

Space has always been confusing to politics.

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

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.

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.

The prevalence of mobile homes does not correspond with the prevalence of poverty, or with much of anything else. All that can be confidently said about America's mobile homes is that they are massed in places where you wouldn't want to be in one. Florida's mobile homes lie athwart the path of hurricanes. Georgia's are in the way of tornadoes.

Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.

There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.

Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.

The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.

Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.

A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.

Who, other than a crazy person, does anything besides hang up on a robo-call? Any call, any person, anywhere, under any circumstances.

Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.

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.

In Toledo, people grow out. Out to the suburbs. Out to the parts of America where the economy is more vigorous. And all too often, out to 48-inch waistbands.

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.

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

When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.

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.

The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.

Rich people don't like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don't go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.

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.

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.

When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he's saving a parking place.

Obama's space policy doesn't differ much from George W. Bush's.

A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?'

Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

The First Amendment only says 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' It can disrespect all it wants.

The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon.

Of course, no one wants to ban the vote. Voting should remain available for sporting and recreational purposes. But certain types of votes clearly should be curtailed - 'assault votes,' for example, in which the only purpose of the vote is to harm others.

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.

Globalization is simply opening the free marketplace to encompass the entire world.

I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.

Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.

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.

We've come into the world of '1984,' but it turns out to be '1984'-Lite.

One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you're not in the Army.

To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.

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.

War expands government powers. The trouble is that, when the war goes away, the government powers do not.

No Americans wants to see somebody lose their house because of health bills. Their boat? Maybe. Maybe the boat. But not the house.

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

I was never a Democrat. I went from Republican to Maoist and then back again.

I blame feminism and Facebook for the death of the American automobile. I'm a Republican, so I blame everything on feminism - or commies.