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.'

I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.

Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.

If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.

Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-workers and so on, but actually hate the job they do.

One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them.

I've got a 1990 Porsche 911. It's just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.

If we were to inspect ourselves or members of our family and our friends, we would see that we don't really have to go all the way overseas to be mystified - we can be mystified right at home.

I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.

I like to have interesting things to write about. And when one says something is 'interesting,' one almost always means 'bad.'

I believe in God. God created the world.

Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.

One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you're not in the Army.

Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.

Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it's got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It's not pretty. But it's striking, I'll give it that. It's not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.

Jimmy Carter was - he still - he remains to this day America's most ex of ex-presidents. You just can't believe that we elected this doofus. He was a bright enough guy and sort of well-meaning. But he was about as prepared to be president of the United States as your goofy old uncle, you know, the one that memorises baseball statistics.

Politics won't allow for the truth.

I don't think anybody's really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory.

Why can't death - if we must have it - be always glorious, as in 'The Iliad?'

I think it's always easy to be sympathetic to parts of the government in detail; in their concrete manifestations. Because obviously, we don't have government for no reason.

Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.

Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.

Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.

Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.

Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation - as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed.

Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.

The baby boomers' politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there's been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.

Of all the American educational system's problems, none is more severe than the academic year beginning before Labor Day.

Love can never be fully explained.

Detroit is beautiful - though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it.

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.

The purpose of sports - even foreign sports - is not to bore people.

In midlife, we're as dumb as we get.

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

The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the '70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.

Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that brightens life.

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.

The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore.

Lyndon Johnson faced some clear moral issues.

You're not a baby boomer if you don't have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate.

Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.

Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.

The good thing about SUVs is they have storage.

Inside every Sancho Panza there's a Don Quixote struggling to get out.

I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.

There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.

I was never a Democrat. I went from Republican to Maoist and then back again.