460 Quotes by P.J. O'Rourke

France in August when you can travel through the entire country without encountering a single pesky Frenchman or being bothered with anything that’s open for business.

And worrying is less work than doing something to fix the worry. This is especially true if we’re careful to pick the biggest possible problems to worry about. Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody want to help Mom do the dishes.

Never fight an inanimate object.

Government conspiracy? They can’t even deliver our mail and it’s got our address on it and everything!

Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated – serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

Dates used to be made days or even weeks in advance. Now dates tend to be made the day after. That is, you get a phone call from someone who says, “If anyone asks, I was out to dinner with you last night, okay?”

In the past a man was expected to give his seat on a bus to a woman. Today it would be much more courteous for that man to give her his job.

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.