P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

• 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.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human, Condition

• 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.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Journalist, Guarantee

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

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Computer

• What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Government

• 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.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Think, Measurement

• 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.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Soldiers

• One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world – and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East – is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn’t there. It has to do with history.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in History

  Tags in World, Problem

• 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.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in History

  Tags in Happiness, Peace

• People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in People

• I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American

• There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Point Of View

• I’m a political conservative.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Political

• Satire doesn’t effect change.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Change

• 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.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Women, Behaviour

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

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fortunately

• You don’t despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Best

• I read good. I was an English major.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in English

• 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.

   

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Politics

  Tags in Positive Thinking

• Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Worth

• 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.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Country

P. J. O'Rourke (107)

Birth:	14th November, 1947
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Journalist, Politician, Satirist, Writer

About

P. J. O'Rourke is an American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. In the United Kingdom, he is known as the face of a long-running series of television advertisements for British Airways in the 1990s.

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