Famous Quotes

Quotes by P J Orourke

• A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too.
• After all, what is your host's purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
• All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.
• Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
• Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
• 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.
• Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly.
• Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.
• Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
• Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
• Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
• Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
• Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
• 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.
• Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
• Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
• Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
• I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements.
• I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.
• I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a 'learning experience.' It makes me feel less stupid.
• I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.
• 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.
• Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
• If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
• If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat - in other words, turn you into an adult.
• In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
• Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.
• 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.
• My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you're fortunate - and both of us are - you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.
• Never fight an inanimate object.
• Never wear anything that panics the cat.
• No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.