When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Anyone who has studied psychology, sociology, anthropology, or any of the other wacko-and-wog disciplines knows the three great rules of the social sciences: Folks do lots of things. We don't know why. Test on Friday.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
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.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation's capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
The forces of safety are afoot in the land. I, for one, believe it is a conspiracy
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
A pleasant natural environment is a good
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind, goddamnit!
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Haitians weren't screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
I guess the argument of contextuality is that anything is okay as long as it's done by people who are sufficiently unlike you.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
I suspect the Haitian Ministry of Health's principal contribution to health in Haiti is providing nice, healthy jobs to those Haitians with the connection to get them.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
If the politics of disease are to be understood, particularly in the dreadful countries where this understanding is most needed, then the politics of total collapse have to be understood first.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
In a society where commonwealth does not exist, there are no duties, only exactations to be avoided, and no freedoms, only privileges to be grabbed. There can be no such thing as "public services" because nothing in the country is truly public. Everything is somebody's fief. And every fief must be exploited if the exploiter cares to survive.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). And this is not just a Somali problem. We have poverty and deprivation in our own country. Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Most of the research about species extinction has been conducted on islands because islands are controlled environments and scientists can get drinks with little umbrellas in them there... Island logic also tells us that an increase in habitat size means an increase in number of species. But it doesn't necessarily. You can build your bed as large as you like and still get very few people to sleep with you.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
People with a mission to save the earth want the earth to seem worse than it is so their mission will look more important.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
There is a fine line in the Third World between half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe and half a dozen customs officials waiting for you to offer them a bribe so they can throw you in jail.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
A charity ball is like a dance except it's tax deductible.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life; but only a fool trusts either of them.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Anyone who has studied psychology, sociology, anthropology, or any of the other wacko-and-wog disciplines knows the three great rules of the social sciences: Folks do lots of things. We don't know why. Test on Friday.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
I wonder how many people in the so-called creative fields stand before their accumulated professional efforts and think the thing they've been doing for the past quarter of a century is a thing for which they have no particular talent. Not enough, to judge by the too copious output of various mature painters, poets and architects.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors
-- P. J. O'Rourke
There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as caring and sensitive because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he is willing to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he will do good with his own money� If a gun is held to his head.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
There's a difference between information and knowledge. It's the difference between Christy Turlington's phone number and Christy Turlington.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
You can't get good chinese takeout in China and cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
The Middle Eastern states aren't nations; they're quarrels with borders.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
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