P. J. O'Rourke quote: "Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, because they don't read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.'"

Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on Ne...
P. J. O'ROURKE

A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.
J. P. MORGAN

When you expect things to happen - strangely enough - they do happen.
J. P. MORGAN

Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do ...
J. P. MORGAN

If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.
J. P. MORGAN

No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty...
J. P. MORGAN

I got disappointed in human nature as well and gave it up because I found it too much like my own.
J. P. DONLEAVY

To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.
J. P. DONLEAVY

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J. P. DONLEAVY

Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jur...
P. J. O'ROURKE

My mom is a sculptress.
P. J. HARVEY

I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels...
P. J. HARVEY

I've always felt that I'm affected by the world, by the way we treat each other, by the way ...
P. J. HARVEY

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doi...
P. J. HARVEY

I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or ...
P. J. HARVEY

I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it's very ph...
P. J. HARVEY

I'm a very private person, so obviously I don't enjoy talking about more personal matters.
P. J. HARVEY

My father is actually a quarry man - he deals in stone. He also at one point had a lot of sheep, he ...
P. J. HARVEY

With songs I almost see the images, see the action, and then all I have to do is describe it. It'...
P. J. HARVEY

I decide immediately if I like a person and if I do, then I'm myself, and if I don't, then I...
P. J. HARVEY

I'm a Libra. That means that I can make a decision, but only after much thought.
P. J. HARVEY

There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their ...
P. J. HARVEY

People have a tendency to see country life through rose-colored glasses.
P. J. HARVEY

It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore...
P. J. HARVEY

Making me into a role model is placing too much importance on what I see as a work in progress.
P. J. HARVEY

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. ...
P. J. HARVEY

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like ...
P. J. HARVEY

There is nothing more boring than doing singing exercises.
P. J. HARVEY

People like Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain B...
P. J. HARVEY

I firmly disbelieve that one has to be a tortured soul to write good music.
P. J. HARVEY

I don't loathe interviews, I'm just one of those people who makes music because I find it di...
P. J. HARVEY

I think that's always very valuable: to keep the mind open to receiving all sorts of information...
P. J. HARVEY

I tried to use words that were dealing with the emotional quality that any human being could recogni...
P. J. HARVEY

I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, beca...
P. J. HARVEY

I've always been very visceral in that I feel things very deeply.
P. J. HARVEY

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyon...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.
P. J. O'ROURKE

In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky even...
P. J. O'ROURKE

People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that wa...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.
P. J. O'ROURKE

I am unboreable in the great outdoors.
P. J. O'ROURKE

To mistrust science and deny the validity of scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-work...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
P. J. O'ROURKE

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove t...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Guns are the ultimate bulwark against government misbehavior.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you k...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who i...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won't dig up the pr...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you're handing out plagues of darkness,...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let&#...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Life is just a dirty four-letter word: W-O-R-K.
J. P. MCEVOY

Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; ...
J. P. SENN

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J. P. DONLEAVY

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to...
P. J. PLAUGER

In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, im...
P. J. O'ROURKE

When you don't have any money, the problem is food, When you have money, it's sex. When you have bot...
J. P. DONLEAVY

Nothing bad is going to happen to us. If we get fired, it's not failure; its a midlife vocational re...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why...
P. J. O'ROURKE

You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
P. J. O'ROURKE

People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic g...
P. J. O'ROURKE

I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste and style mixed together so that yo...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The principle feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad thin...
P. J. O'ROURKE

In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propa...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishmen...
P. J. O'ROURKE

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind ha...
P. J. O'ROURKE

When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin.
J. P. DONLEAVY

The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the s...
P. J. O'ROURKE

But Jesus, when you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When y...
J. P. DONLEAVY

Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and tho...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But -- like other precious, sacred things...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spou...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. The...
P. J. O'ROURKE

There's no telling what might have happened to our defense budget if Saddam Hussein hadn't invaded K...
P. J. O'ROURKE

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficu...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Some people are better imagined in one's bed than found there in the morning.
P. J. O'ROURKE

There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice...
J. P. SENN

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
P. J. O'ROURKE

A man always has two reasons for doing anything--a good reason and the real reason.
J. P. MORGAN

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiv...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in th...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.
P. J. O'ROURKE

What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of prog...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-sh...
P. J. O'ROURKE

What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians - whatever those motives may be - is that politic...
P. J. O'ROURKE

I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
P. J. O'ROURKE

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously inv...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs i...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Global warming is a fact. Now it's up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial i...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Upbeat is for people who want to feel good about their cause: the reformers, the progressives, the r...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, P...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Never wear anything that panics the cat.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the econ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
P. J. O'ROURKE

If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A poli...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but moth...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Gun violence has cost us too many political leaders, and hardly ever the worst ones.
P. J. O'ROURKE

The two most frightening words in Washington are 'bipartisan consensus.' Bipartisan consensu...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head c...
P. J. O'ROURKE

I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level...
P. J. O'ROURKE

A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.
J. P. MORGAN

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.
P. J. O'ROURKE

The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry - knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wi...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Why do elites hate the poor? It's xenophobia. They don't know any poor people - except their...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools inst...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Disney's House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades...
P. J. O'ROURKE

All business is capitalistic. You require capital for any sort of business endeavour.
P. J. O'ROURKE

The great apologist has to have lived large and wild. If he's going to kiss the world's boo-...
P. J. O'ROURKE

'Carrie' was a pretty big-budget movie at a real studio, with a director that had already do...
P. J. SOLES

I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Jimmy Carter was - he still - he remains to this day America's most ex of ex-presidents. You jus...
P. J. O'ROURKE

There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a cer...
P. J. O'ROURKE

In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is mo...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Everybody with a gun has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, you'd be crazy not to have a g...
P. J. O'ROURKE

A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It's a promissory note that doesn't a...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The baby boomers' politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground t...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Now, do I think the baby boomers tend to be self-absorbed? I do.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted a...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The car provided Americans with an enviable standard of living. You could not get a steady job with ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Of course, no one wants to ban the vote. Voting should remain available for sporting and recreationa...
P. J. O'ROURKE

You're not a baby boomer if you don't have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King a...
P. J. O'ROURKE

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to t...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men be...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in...
P. J. O'ROURKE

We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

I'm on Medicare now. If I go and have a big operation, it costs me nothing. It should cost me a ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been s...
P. J. HARVEY

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see farther.
J. P. MORGAN

Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blas...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the l...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's u...
P. J. O'ROURKE

As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, R...
P. J. O'ROURKE

What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding de...
P. J. O'ROURKE

There are a number of Americans who shouldn't vote. The number is 57 percent, to judge by the co...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitche...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled...
P. J. O'ROURKE

If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, Wo...
P. J. O'ROURKE

You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don'...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Northwest Ohio is flat. There isn't much up. The land is so flat that a child from Toledo is und...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.
P. J. O'ROURKE

A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?'
P. J. O'ROURKE

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the sche...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum.
P. J. O'ROURKE

If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I'd claim it w...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Detroit's industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.
P. J. O'ROURKE

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bl...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway inste...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Kids are disorganized.
P. J. O'ROURKE

People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it's the lowering of trade barriers th...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J P DONLEAVY

Inside every Sancho Panza there's a Don Quixote struggling to get out.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box.
P. J. O'ROURKE

In Hong Kong there is agglomeration beyond my fondest imaginings. The Kowloon district claims a popu...
P. J. O'ROURKE

There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change - or whatever the currently ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it's got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. I...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the Dist...
P. J. O'ROURKE

It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with...
P. J. O'ROURKE

I'm too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom's earring in h...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.
P. J. O'ROURKE

Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefull...
P. J. O'ROURKE

I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a learning experience. Then again, I like to think ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

The purpose of a funeral service is to comfort the living. It is important at a funeral to display e...
P. J. O'ROURKE

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-...
P. J. O'ROURKE

With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today...
P. J. O'ROURKE

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are le...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and ...
P. J. O'ROURKE

Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, because they don't read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.'

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P. J. O'Rourke

Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, because they don't read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.'

P. J. O'Rourke

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