Last updated on September 18, 2024
I read a significant portion of P. J. O’Rourke‘s Parliament of Whores in several airports on a trip with several layovers. In one airport bar, I couldn’t hold back laughing out loud which led to a conversation with several people that also had read the book and couldn’t keep their laughter to themselves. That was just part of the experience of reading P. J. O’Rourke. From National Lampoon to Rolling Stone to the Atlantic to Car and Driver, any time his wit met a page, hilarity was soon to follow. Few writers have consistently entertained me over the years and I am going to miss him.
One thing that I certainly learned from him is that jokes are more important than points. Once we are laughing together, we can find our way to cooperation. If we are too busy making points and winning arguments, we are just too preoccupied with things other than communicating. A witty disagreement is preferable to a point-by-point take-down.
Few writers are as quotable. O’Rourke was our generation’s H. L. Mencken and his writing had the same kind of truthful bite that entertained you while making you slightly uncomfortable with the state of the world. Here are some of my favorite of his quotes:
There is only one basic human right: the right to do as you please, without causing others harm. With it comes our only basic human duty: the duty to accept the consequences of our actions.
Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
The Three Branches of Government: Money, Television, and Bullshit
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
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.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
The collegiate idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government.
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.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
We had a choice between Democrats who couldn’t learn from the past and Republicans who couldn’t stop living in it.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
The Democrats said, “We don’t know what’s wrong with America, but we can fix it.” The Republicans said, “There’s nothing wrong with America, and we can fix that.”
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable. They still sound reasonable, in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
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.”
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
So what if I don’t agree with the Democrats? What’s to disagree with? They believe everything. And what they don’t believe, the Republicans do. Neither of them stands for anything they believe in, anyway.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
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.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You’d better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
In the American political system, you’re only allowed to have real ideas if it’s absolutely guaranteed that you can’t win an election
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
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 philosophy of sniveling brats.
Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer
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.
Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer
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.
Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer
The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors–psychology, sociology, women’s studies–to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you’d have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.
Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer
Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer
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.
Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer
Wealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued. But liberals aren’t very interested in such real and material freedoms. They have a more innocent – not to say toddlerlike – idea of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums.
Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer
The principal 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.
Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer
Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they’ve got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.
Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer
Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free – indeed, sanctimonious – way for “progressives” to be racists.
All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty
In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word : Dentistry.
All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty
Poverty can’t be eliminated by punishing people who’ve escaped poverty.
All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty
Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit
All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty
Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty
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.
All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty
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.
All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty
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.
All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty
We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it’s hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald’s from a speeding train. And we’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut
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.
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut
The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers? Or maybe the people in Texas were attacked because of child abuse. But, if child abuse was the issue, why didn’t Janet Reno tear-gas Woody Allen?
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut
I can understand why mankind hasn’t given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners – two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.
Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World’s Worst Places and Asks, “What’s Funny About This?”
One of these suburbs is actually named Stalingrad, which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793.
Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World’s Worst Places and Asks, “What’s Funny About This?”
Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I’m worried about the difference between wrong and fun.
Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World’s Worst Places and Asks, “What’s Funny About This?”
It is easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America’s favorite pet. People like pets to possess the same qualities they do. Cats are irresponsible and recognize no authority, yet are completely dependent on others for their material needs. Cats cannot be made to do anything useful. Cats are mean for the fun of it. In fact, cats possess so many of the same qualities as people that it is often hard to tell the people and the cats apart.
Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People
Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.
Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People
It’s better to spend money like there’s no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there’s no money.
Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People
Feminism is the result of a few ignorant and literal-minded women letting the cat out of the bag about which is the superior sex. Once women made it public that they could do things better than men, they were, of course, forced to do them.
Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People
Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste and style mixed together so that you don’t need any of those things.
Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People
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.
Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People
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.
Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Readerbus
When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state … this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.
Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader
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.
Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader
Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall gin-and-tonic is the way to save the planet.
Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader
If you spend seventy-two hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter.
Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader
In the end we beat them with Levi’s 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.
Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.
Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader
Any person who has spent time outdoors actually doing something, such as hunting and fishing as opposed to standing there with a doobie in his mouth, knows nature is not intrinsically healthy.
Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader
Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics
Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics
If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the pverty, not the difference. Wealth is good.
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics
Political systems must love poverty-they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. And politicians in democracies benefit from destitution, too. The US has had a broad range of poverty programs for 30 years. Those programs have failed. Millions of people are still poor. And those people vote for politicians who favor keeping the poverty programs in place. There’s a conspiracy theory in there somewhere.
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 – to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell.
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economic
Microeconomics is about money you don’t have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economic
My Grandmother wouldn’t even speak the word Democrat if there were children in the room, she’d say Bastards instead.
Republican Party Reptile: The Confessions, Adventures, Essays and (Other) Outrages of P.J. O’Rourke
Everything that’s fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow … It is impossible to be alive and safe.
Republican Party Reptile: The Confessions, Adventures, Essays and (Other) Outrages of P.J. O’Rourke
Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history.
Republican Party Reptile: The Confessions, Adventures, Essays and (Other) Outrages of P.J. O’Rourke
Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.
Republican Party Reptile: The Confessions, Adventures, Essays and (Other) Outrages of P.J. O’Rourke
A politician who commends himself as ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to do good with other peoples’ money.
The American Spectator’s Enemies List: A Vigilant Journalist’s Plea for a Renewed Red Scare
Let’s reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools – and use it on the teachers.
The American Spectator’s Enemies List: A Vigilant Journalist’s Plea for a Renewed Red Scare
Smoking crack is a way for people who couldn’t afford college to study the works of Charles Darwin.
The CEO of the Sofa
Then there was communism’s weak-tea sister, socialism. Socialists maintained that we shouldn’t take all the money away from all the people since all the people don’t have money. We should take all the money away from only the people who make money. Then, when we run out of that, we could take more money from the people who…hey, wait! Where’d you people go? What do you mean you’re “tax exiles in Monaco?”
The CEO of the Sofa
The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.
The CEO of the Sofa
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.
Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism
A girl who is really pretty – whether she wraps herself in an abayah, a nun’s habit, or the front hall rug – never wraps herself so that the world can’t tell.
Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism
I was told to hand over my disposable lighter, to prevent, I suppose, any threat of “Do what I say or I’ll light this Marlboro and you’ll all die – in thirty years due to inhalation of secondhand smoke.”
Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism
The motorcycle is a device created by the team of God and Darwin to rid the world of useless young males.
Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending, Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed To Be
“The Affordable Health Care for Americans Act, passed by the House of Representatives on November 7, 2009, was 1,990 pages long. You could stand on it to paint the ceiling. The entire U.S. Constitution can be printed on eight pages. That’s eight pages to run a whole country for 221 years versus four reams of government pig latin if you slam your thumb in a car door.”
Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards
Politicians show no signs of even knowing the difference between negative and positive rights. Blinded by the dazzle of anything that makes them popular, they honestly may not be able to tell.
Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards
The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That’s all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165.
Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards
Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.
Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards
Anybody who’s having fun at an Elk Lodge meeting has the fun thing figured out.
The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way, And It Wasn’t My Fault, And I’ll Never Do It Again
As Mark Twain said, “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” (And every other branch of the federal government.)
None of My Business
Although not in real life. In 2006 Gibson got in trouble for an anti-Semitic outburst at a Los Angles County sheriff’s deputy who’d pulled Mel over for suspected DUI. After we got to hear what Mel was thinking, he had to enter a substance abuse recovery program. Which should remind us that we’ve always had a way to hear what everybody thinks. It’s called booze. Sure puts my mouth in gear. Meanwhile, what social media should be drinking is a big cup of shut up.
A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land
Among the properties that belong to you are a pair of lungs. The Internet tells me (for free again) that those lungs emit 2.3 pounds of carbon dioxide a day. Multiply by world population and that’s 17.25 trillion pounds of carbon dioxide, which is much more than the 209 billion pounds of carbon dioxide that burning fossil fuels emits daily.
A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land
The Lampoon started in 1970, and I began writing freelance for them around the end of 1971, and then all through ’72. They hired me in ’73, and I left early in ’81. I did everything from low puns to being editor-in-chief.
Liberalism is just Communism sold by the drink.
It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China’s one-child policy or America’s one-parent policy.
Term limits aren’t enough. We need jail.
Most of the people who have grabbed hold of climate change and greenhouse gases, pollution, oil dependency – they have another motive, and their motive is to attain the appearance of virtue without having actually done anything virtuous.
The three branches of government number considerably more than three and are not, in any sense, ‘branches’ since that would imply that there is something they are all attached to besides self-aggrandizement and our pocketbooks. … Government is not a machine with parts; it’s an organism. When does an intestine quit being an intestine and start becoming an asshole?
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 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.
I have a 10 year old at home, and she is always saying, ‘That’s not fair.’ When she says that, I say, “Honey, you’re cute; that’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off; that’s not fair. You were born in America; that’s not fair. Honey, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.
The Middle Eastern states aren’t nations; they’re quarrels with borders.
People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.
The purpose of the Senate is to keep 100 middle aged knuckleheads out of the private sector where they can do real harm.
Government conspiracy? They can’t even deliver our mail and it’s got our address on it and everything!
There’s a very good reason that governments aren’t supposed to compete with private-enterprise companies. Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.
Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.
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.
Think about last time you were broke … now how well did it go with spending your way out of it? Did that work?
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 your 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. … Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, ‘Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?’
People are all exactly alike. 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. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.
I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.
The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don’t think that way. We don’t think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you’ve got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags.
The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.
There are no kinder or better people in the world than those who listen to you when you are 18.
If libertarianism were easy to explain, and it weren’t easy to exaggerate the effects of libertarianism, I think it would have been done already. Many many very intelligent people have applied themselves to crafting an agenda that people could grab ahold of. But the problem of course is that libertarianism isn’t political. It is kind of anti-political. It wants to take a lot of things out of the political arena.
B students work for C students – A students teach.
Humor is a terrific tool for explaining things, especially when what you’re explaining is frightening or dull and complicated.
What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.
Collectivism doesn’t work because it’s based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person’s “fair share” of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless.
Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.
Hunter S. Thompson brings a lunatic genius to ordinary events, and I bring an ordinary sensibility to lunatic events.
Drugs have taught an entire generation of kids the metric system
You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.
