460 Quotes by P.J. O'Rourke

A firm, hearty handshake gives a good first impression, and you’ll never be forgiven if you don’t live up to it.

Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It’s easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America’s favorite poet. People like poets to possess the same qualities they do.

Long conversations with pals when neither you nor they have had a drink can be a test of palship.

The old woman was not only ugly with the ugliness age brings us all but showed signs of formidable ugliness by birth – pickle-jar chin, mainsail ears and a nose like a trigonometry problem. What’s more, she had the deep frown and snit wrinkles that come from a lifetime of bad character.

I was told to hand over my disposable lighter, to prevent, I suppose, any threat of “Do what I say or I’ll light this Marlboro and you’ll all die – in thirty years due to inhalation of secondhand smoke.”

The day was warm and clear. Kids were playing soccer in the parking lots and women were sunning their babies and having their tea all over the lawns. The scene was entirely too cheery for journalism.

I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.

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.

Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.