P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

• There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

• For reasons of high aesthetic principle, I do not write on a computer.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Sometimes it’s hard to remember that bourgeois property is the real revolutionary force these days. All over the world we’re bringing down dictatorships-or at least forcing them to go condo.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Communism doesn’t really starve or execute that many people. Mostly it just bores them to death.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Everybody wants to save the world but nobody wants to help mom with the dishes.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Mom

• We had a choice between Democrats who couldn’t learn from the past and Republicans who couldn’t stop living in it.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Politics

• One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere. I strongly support paper recycling.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Humour

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

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Books

• The average IQ in America is—and this can be proven mathematically—average.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Humor

• We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Human

• 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

• 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 idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Failure, Success

  Tags in Idea

• It’s better to make fun of yourself because you’ve always got someone around to make fun of, and they can’t sue you.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fun, Better

• Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

   

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Economics

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

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Humorist

• 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

• 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.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Understand

• Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Information

• As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one’s friends’ and relatives’ children.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Topics in Children, Funny

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.

Related Authors

• Marina Tavares Dias
• Paul Krassner
• Dorothy Thompson
• Lily Burana
• Gregg Easterbrook
• Joseph Pulitzer
• Susan L. Taylor
• Jilly Cooper
• Marvin Olasky
• Carl Bernstein

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 19th November

Births

• 1936 - Yuan T. Lee
• 1959 - Richard Virenque
• 1942 - Gary Ackerman
• 1958 - Michael Wilbon
• 1919 - Alan Young

Deaths

• 1915 - Solomon Schechter
• 1692 - Thomas Shadwell
• 1971 - Xu Zhimo
• 1987 - Sir John Rupert Colville
• 2004 - Terry Melcher