"The First Amendment forbids any law "abridging the freedom of speech". It doesn't say, "except for commercials on children's television" or "unless somebody says `cunt' in a rap song or `chick' on a college campus." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Our government gets more than thugs in a protection racket demand, even more than discarded first wives of famous rich men receive in divorce court." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "...remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay taxes, you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot. Thus I -- in my role as citizen and voter -- am going to shoot you -- in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck -- if you don't pay your fair share of the national tab. Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, "Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?" [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "The Second Amendment states that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed", period. There is no mention of magazine sizes, the rate of fire or to what extent these arms may resemble assault rifles. All rifles were assault rifles in those days." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "The neo-hippie-dips, the sentimentality-crazed iguana anthropomorphizers, the Chicken Littles, the three-bong-hit William Blakes -- thank God these people don't actually go outdoors much, or the environment would be even worse than it is already." [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 -- the `right' to education, the `'right' to health care, the `right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There's 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] ------- "...this government, swollen and arrogant with itself, goes butting into our business...It checks the amount of tropical oils in our snack foods, tells us what kind of gasoline we can buy for our cars and how fast we can drive them, bosses us around about retirement, education, and what's on TV; counts our noses and asks fresh questions about who's still living at home and how many bathrooms we have; decides whether the door to our office or shop should have steps or a wheelchair ramp; decrees the sex and complexion of the people we hire there; lectures us on safe sex; dictates what we can sniff, smoke, and swallow; and waylays young men, ships them to distant places, and tells them to shoot people they don't even know." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than tribal wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. "Oh no, the Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me some silver and I'll make him spit her out." [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] ------- "You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have. Government contains impure ingredients -- as anybody who's ever looked at Congress can tell you. On the basis of Bill Clinton's...campaign promises, I think we can say government practices deceptive advertising. And the merest glance at the federal budget is enough to convict the government of perjury, extortion, and fraud." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "The principle feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things-war and hunger and date rape-liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things...It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life -- this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable...in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Usually, writers will do anything to avoid writing. For instance, the previous sentence was written at one o'clock this afternnon. It is now a quarter to four. I have spent the past two hours and forty-five minutes sorting my neckties by width, looking up the word /paisly/ in three dictionaries, attempting to find the town of that name on /The New York Times Atlas of the World/ map of Scotland, sorting my reference books by width, trying to get the bookcase to stop wobbling by stuffing a matchbook cover under its corner, dialing the telephone number on the matchbook cover to see if I should take computer courses at night, looking at the computer ads in the newspaper and deciding to buy a computer because writing seems to be so difficult on my old Remington, reading an interesting article on sorghum farming in Uruguay that was in the newspaper next to the computer ads, cutting that and other interesting articles out of the newspaper, sorting -- by width -- all the interesting articles I've cut out of newspapers recently, fastening them neatly together with paper clips and making a very attractive paper clip necklace and bracelet set, which I will present to my girlfriend as soon as she comes home from the three-hour low-impact aerobic workout that I made her go to so I could have some time alone to write." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor." [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--in other words, turn you into an adult." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Seriousness is stupidity sent to college." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Marijuana is ...self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?" [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "There's something about Marxism that brings out warts-the only kind of growth this economic system encourages." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "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." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed...Trouble doesn't come from Slopes, Kikes, Niggers, Spics or White Capitalist Pigs; it comes from the heart." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us." [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] ------- "West Germans are tall, pert and orthodontically corrected, with hands, teeth and hair as clean as their clothes and clothes as sharp as their looks. Except for the fact that they all speak English pretty well, they're indistinguishable from Americans." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about "character issues." Either that or just go ahead and determine the presidency with three-legged races and pie-eating contests. It would make better TV." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "For the people in government, rather than the people who pester it, Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "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." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "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." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three- ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system...has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes...Now they're lunch, and we're number one on the planet." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "So-called Western Civilization, as practised in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western civilization not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to. Our civilization is the first in history to show even the slightest concern for average, undistinguished, none-too-commendable people like us." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer-a noisy but small and useless part of the national household." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you've half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're doing a hundred miles an hour in a suburban side street." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody?...Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "We have no one to blame for the Kennedys but ourselves. We took the Kennedys to heart of our own accord. And it is my opinion that we did it not because we respected them or thought what they proposed was good, but because they were pretty. We, the electorate, were smitten by this handsome, vivacious family... We wanted to hug their golden tousled heads to our dumpy breasts." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "The federal government of the United States of America takes away between a fifth and a quarter of all out money every year. That is eight times the Islamic zakat, the almsgiving required of believers by the Koran; it is double the tithe of the medieval church and twice the royal tribute that the prophet Samuel warned the Israelites against when they wanted him to annount a ruler..." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And -- since women are a majority of the population -- we'd all be married to Mel Gibson." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "This is living!" "I gotta be me!" "Ain't we got fun!" It's all there in the Declaration of Independence. We are the only nation in the world based on happiness. Search as you will the Maga Charta, the /Communist Manifesto/, the Ten Commandments, the Analects of Confucius, Plato's /Republic/, the New Testament or the UN Charter, and find me any happiness at all." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "In July 1988 I attended the specious, entropic, criminally trivial, boring, stupid Democratic National Convention -- a numb suckhole stuffed with political bulk filler..." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "...with barely time to hose the Dukakis sludge out of my tape recorder and scrape the talk of Democratic-party unity off the bottom of my loafers -- I flew to that other oleo-high colonic, the Republican convention, and event with the intellectual content of a Guns n' Roses lyric attended by every ofey insurance broker in America who owns a pair of white shoes..." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "These are shameful affairs, our political party conclaves..." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Conventions no longer even determine who's going to run for president. Unvoted-in primaries at weird times of the year in states you've never even heard of take care of that." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "George [Bush] ran one of the great room-temperature political campaigns of all time, saying, basically, "American's had a great eight years. Maybe a vague president and an incompetent and somewhat corrupt administration is what the nation /needs/." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "There is no reference to abortion in the Constitution, not so much as an "I'll pull out in time, honey, honest." The Tenth Amendment tells us that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." This means the power to drive the nation crazy over a gob of meiotic cells that wouldn't fill a coke spoon and, on the other hand, the power to murder innocent babies that havent even been born yet are -- just as the amendment says -- "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "So when can we quit passing laws and raising taxes? When can we say of our political system, "Stick a fork in it, it's done"? When will our officers, officials and magistrates realize that their jobs are finished and return, like Cincinnatus, to the plow or, as it were, to the law practice or the car dealership? The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "[Pete] DuPont said that farmers should go pound sand with the rest of us. When somebody's muffler shop goes bankrupt, the government doesn't pay him $100,000 to not install mufflers." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation's capital, begin to think of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stonographers. Washington journalists are seduced by their proximity to power..." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "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." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "You say our country's never been invaded? You're right, little buddy. Because I'd like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who'd have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can't hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I'd rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than a king, queen and jack of all you Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Term limits aren't enough. We need jail." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Communists, Nazis, and more than a few democratically elected leaders of the free world have told us in plain language that their loathsome acts were justified by felicific calculus -- the most good for the greatest number." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "As for Clinton's attitude toward the Haitians, why he's glad to invade their country. He's perfectly willing to shoot Haitians. But let them drive cabs in New York city? Oh no." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "FDA employees are serious about feat. We pay these people to panic about an iota of rodent hair in our chili, even when the recipe calls for it." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "If the rain forest disappears, we'll have to get our air in little bottles from the Evian company, and biodiversity will vanish, and pretty soon we'll have only about one kind of animal...The indigenous peoples will all become exdigenous and move to L.A.; and this will be tough on them because it's hard to use a car phone when you've got a big wooden disk in your lower lip. Furthermore, we'll never discover all the marvelous properties of the various herbal treasures that are found in the rain forest, such as Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch." [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] ------- "Avoid worriers. They are haters of liberty and loathers of individuals. They wish to politicize everything. Imagine Bill Clinton conducting your love life for yout. And watch out, he may be trying to." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Crack is ruining America's inner cities. Crack is killing policement, overburdening courts, and filling jails beyond their capacity. Crack is devastating thousands of families. Crack is putting the lives and well-being of our children at risk. Now delete the words "crack is" and insert the words "niggers are." Isn't this the secret message of the drug-free America campaign?" [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "I can remember the antediluvian age of dope hysteria, when the occasional bebop musician's ownership of a Mary Jane cigarette threatened to turn every middle-class American teenager into a sex-crazed car thief." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "According to the USGAO report to COngress on the 1990 farm bill, "The government established a wool and mohair price-support program in 1954 ...to encourage domestic wool production in the interst of natural security." Really, it says that. I guess back in the fifties there was this military school of thought that held that in the event of a Soviet attack we could confuse and disorient the enemy by throwing blankets over their heads..." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "...I did /not/ go to see the Earth Day demonstration in the Mall. Instead, I spent the day calling up environmentally minded friends and asking them, "If the outdoors are so swell, how come the homeless aren't more fond of it?" I wanted to be the one person to say a discouraging word on Earth Day -- a lone voice, not crying in the wilderness, but chortling in the rec room." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Best of all, there were hardly any beautiful women at the [Housing Now!] rally. I saw a journalist friend of mine in the Mall, and he and I purused this line of inquiry as assiduously as our happy private lives allow. Practically every female at the march was a bowser. "We're not being sexist here," my friend insisted. "It's not that looks matter per se. It's just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? In the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed," said my friend. "And this," he looked around him, "isn't it." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "...if the Perennially Indignant think pollution is the fault only of Reaganites wallowing in capitalist greed, then they should go take a deep breath in Smolensk or a long drink from the river Volga." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- On the original Earth Day in 1970 -- when the world was going to end from overcrowding instead of overheating--the best-selling author of /The Population Bomb/, Dr. Paul Ehrlich...predicted that America would have water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980, that hepatitis and dysentery rates in the U.S. would increase by 500 percent due to population density and that the oceans could be as dead as Lake Erie by 1979." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "The [S&L Bailout] will end up costing every man, woman, and child in America $2,000[$500 billion total]. Except it won't. Because not every man, woman, and child in America pays taxes. Babies don't pay taxes. Old farts don't pay taxes. Rich shitpokes with high-hat tax lawyers don't pay taxes, and neither do those high-hat lawyers if they're any good. Welfare chiselers don't pay taxes, nor do drug addicts, drug dealers, and people whom drug dealers have shot dead in the street. Corporations are famous for not paying taxes. Churches don't have to pay taxes. And no taxes are paid by unemployed, layabout brothers-in-law, bum cousins, noodle-brained sisters who give all their money to EST and crazy uncles who are forever losing their shirts in business ventures such as "CHAT-EAU--the catnip flavored blush wine for your cat." That leaves you and me. We're about the only people in America who pay our taxes, So when all's said and done, this savings and loan bailout is going to cost us $250 billion apiece." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "They're whiners and criers, and nothing is ever right so far as they're concerned - somebody's always being persecuted against or exploited on or suffering with something somewhere, and we should all be out doing something about it instead of just having fun, like drinking gin or getting a little leg in the back of your Ford. This is what the communist-type person says. And look at their countries, such as Russia: no good bands, no dance halls, no racy movies, no spicy magazines, no horse tracks, no burlesque shows - they don't even have modern art (and there is nothing on earth more boring than modern art, but even that's too exciting for them). This comes from having a country full of communist-type people - the kind of people who worry about great big rights and wrongs. I'm here to tell you that turns them into dips, limpwicks, and weenies. I don't know how it works, exactly, but it does. Maybe thinking about all that big important stuff makes them sit the way they all do, you know, with their legs crossed at the knees and pressed together too hard so that the lower part of their body doesn't get as much blood as it needs so that they don't develop all their sex hormones, which are the hormones that make you want to have a good time, and therefore, they don't want to drink a lot and eat good food and get loved up like we do, but just want to worry instead. Whatever it is, it makes for the kind of person who, when he was a kid, used to do next Tuesday's homework on last Friday night, if you know what I mean. Lots of times he used to be a minister's son, which isn't a communist, exactly, but usually was a Presbyterian, which is not as bad but still stinks. Well, what you did to the minister's kid was tie him to a fence post with his pants off and dip his pecker in fresh cream and turn a half-weaned calf loose on him. Which is exactly what we should do to all the communists in the world, except with atom bombs." [P.J. O'Rourke, "Age and Guile" - chapter on "The Problem with Communism"] ------- "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." [P.J. O'Rourke, "All The Troubles in the World"] ------- "Communists worship the Devil himself. Socialists think Hell is a good place run by bad people. And liberals want to send everyone to Perdition because it's warm there in winter." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "The poor of the world cannot be made rich by the redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "And Julius Nyerere [former socialist president of Tanzania] apologized, which is more than most '60s icons have bothered to do. When he relinquished the presidency in 1985, he said, in his farewell speech, "I failed. Let's admit it." [P.J. O'Rourke, _Eat The Rich_] ------- "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] ------- "Government usually doesn't work. It doesn't work because it is political. People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs. The difference between the political process and an honest life is the difference between parading around waving picket signs while hollering catcalls in front of the White House and getting up in the morning to go make a living." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "Libertarians don't expect miracles from individuals. We just expect individuals to be individuals, with the limited scope for evil that individuals enjoy. Real evil is coercive, and an individual does not have the power of coercion that a government has. Real good is voluntary, and no government, however democratic, is fully voluntary- as Florida voters discovered in November 2000. Only individuals have free will; systems do not. Voluntary good is done by individuals, for the benefit of individuals. Some of that voluntary good is going to be tasteless and dumb and shortsighted, of little value to mankind as a whole. But the ugliest strip mall is better than the most beautiful gulag." [P.J. O'Rourke, dinner speech, Cato Institute, Washington DC, May 6, 1993 http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v24n4/orourke.pdf] ------- "But also, in libertarianism there is, frankly, an element of despair, because we know that people aren't good. Some of the religious among us believe in the doctrine of original sin. The rest of us watch Maury Povich. We know that people are sneaky, people are greedy, people are cruel. Yet we, as libertarians, want to turn people loose to do whatever they want. We want that because we also know that no matter what bad things individuals do, they are better than the things that get done to individuals by the collective will." [P.J. O'Rourke, dinner speech, Cato Institute, Washington DC, May 6, 1993 http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v24n4/orourke.pdf] ------- "But it's common sense, really, more than common selfishness, that drives the libertarian philosophy. We hold the individual to be self-evident. We believe in the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of the individual, the freedom and responsibility of the individual because we are individuals. We are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively. I may say, like President Clinton, that I feel your pain. But, like President Clinton, I'm lying. Though I will admit, on the subject of feeling the pain of others, that the Clinton administration was collectively a pain in the butt. Anyway, when Elizabeth Hurley has a torrid love affair, I don't get the pleasure. So why should I get the bill for child support? And that's a good question, given our welfare system that lets all the less famous and less beautiful Elizabeth Hurleys put the cost of their children on my income tax tab." [P.J. O'Rourke, dinner speech, Cato Institute, Washington DC, May 6, 1993 http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v24n4/orourke.pdf] ------- "The Three Branches of Government: Money, Television, and Bullshit" [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "We got married, had families, straightened out, got married again, had more families, straightened out (really). There can be no greater sacrifice than that a man lay down his lifestyle for others." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "It's been twenty-one years now. U.S. newspapers, magazines, and television programs weren't, in 1966, filled with agonizing reappraisals of World War II. Let me be the first American to write something about Vietnam without having kittens. I wasn't in the war. I didn't lose my youth and innocence there. (I lost them the regular way, with a calendar.) I don't feel guilty about dodging the draft. Well, I do, but I'm forty-seven years old, and by now I've done a lot of things to feel guilty about. Ducking conscription into a dubious military venture is somewhere down the list. Yes, I had friends who died here. But I had friends who died from cocaine, and I don't get all weird every time I see a glass-topped coffee table. [P.J. O'Rourke (_All the Trouble in the World_, 1994)] ------- "My [college] friends and I were above [studying economics]. In our classes we studied literature, anthropology, and how to make ceramics. We were seeking, questing, growing. Specifically, we were growing sideburns and leg hair, according to gender. It did not occur to us that the frat-pack dolts and Tri-Delt tweeties, hurrying to get to Econ 101 on time (in their square fashion), were the real intellectuals. We never realized that grappling with the concept of aggregate supply and demand was more challenging than writing a paper about "The Effects of Cool Jazz on the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe." What the L-7s were being quizzed on was not only harder to understand than Margaret Mead's theories about necking in Samoa, it was also more important. The engine of existence is fueled by just a few things. Unglazed pottery is not among them." [P.J. O'Rourke, _Eat The Rich_] ------- "Ignorance is a renewable resource" [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosphy of sniveling brats." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "...if fairness is important, what is really fair? We may say something like, "People have a right to food, a right to housing, and a right to a good job for decent pay." But from an economist's perspective, all those rights involve making finite goods meet infinite wants. Unless the fair society generates tremendous economic growth--which societies that put fairness first have trouble doing--the goods will come from redistribution. Try rephrasing the rights statement thus: "People have a right to my food, a right to my housing, and a right to my good job for my decent pay." [P.J. O'Rourke] ------- "The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta. Each political party is a huge pinata -- a papier-mache donkey, for example. The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing, comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budge and other goodies. The American voter is blindfoled and given a stick. The voter then swings the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate on the head and knock some sense into the silly bastard." [P.J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"] -------