Humorous Quotes from P. J. O'Rourke's
All The Trouble in The World

Writing this book required an enormous amount of help from friends. To them goes the credit. I’ll take the money.

Editor Eric Etheridge gave shape and sense to these stories, carefully applying large dabs of Gibberish Remover to my manuscripts.

David E. Davis Jr. called Jurgen Hodel at the Mercedes-Benz press office and Jurgen persuaded Mercedes to loan me a splendid 300 diesel sedan. I would argue that the appearance of this marvelous crimson vehicle in Chabarovice, Libkovice, and Ursi nad Labem made more converts to capitalism in a week than Radio Free Europe did in four decades.

Miami University President Paul Risser was a more than indulgent host. (Sorry about the food fight. That wasn’t a real Renoir, was it?)

“Mencken’s Law”
Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel. - Newspaper Days, 1941

The bad political ideas that have menaced our century – fascism, communism, Ted Kennedy for President – are in retreat.

The typical old-fashioned diet (in the nineteenth century) was so bad it almost assembled modern dieting.

Nowadays we can hardly count our blessings, one of which is surely that we don’t have to do all that counting – computers do it for us. Information is easily had. Education is readily available. Opportunity knocks, it jiggles the doorknob, it will try the window if we don’t have the alarm system on.

The highest standards of luxury and comfort, as known only to the ridiculously wealthy a few generations ago, would hardly do on a modern white-water rafting trip.

Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner’s Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.

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 wants to help Mom do the dishes.

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit.

Some kind of central planning seems to be the object of most environmental activist. But why is a politburo expected to work better for plants and animals than it did for Russians?

Giving certain races or ethnic groups special rights and privileges is no better (in fact, no different) than giving special rights and privileges to dukes and earls. Noblemen are a minority, too, after all.

Memo to Generation X; Pull your pants up, turn your hat around, and get a job.

You can perform open-heart surgery with less intimate contact than is needed to get to Biman (Bangladesh's Airline) ticket agents.

In a trice (which, in Bangladesh, is two and a half hours) we were back in our hired cab, whereupon the Dhaka traffic, which normally doesn’t move, quit doing even that.

How can a country (Bangladesh) not have enough to eat and still smell so much of crap?

There was a tennis court at the bottom of the garden where tennis was played as it should be, with the pace and fervor of badminton.

After sundown I would retire to the hotel bar where everyone who owned a necktie in Dhaka also seemed to be. There was no Muslim rigamarole about drinking, as there is in Pakistan, no showing your foreign passport or swearing that you're Christian.

Dhaka is empty after dark. I don’t know where everybody goes or where there could be room for them either, but even most of the beggars are off duty. And, except for a few university students shooting each other over political matters, it is completely safe.

No two dialings of a phone number on a Bangladeshi telephone result in being connected with the same person twice (unless, apparently, you're calling from the jute minister’s office). A better communication system could be put together with carrier pigeoons, indeed with carrier mice.

When are the world’s political parties going to get appropriate symbols: snake, louse, jackal, outhouse, trash can, clown face, dildo, dollar bill with wings on it?

The Jatiyo Sangsad, Bangladesh’s parliament, is a huge, horribly modern raw concrete complex designed by cranky architect Lous I. Kahn, who once said, “To make a thing deliberately beautiful is a dastardly act,” and meant it.

An estimated 47 percent of the population in the countryside is presently below the poverty line – a line which, in Bangladesh, is drawn not very high above the grave.

Population alarmists have forgotten that each numeral in a census represents an individual human with as much interest in living and as much right to do so as a population alarmist.

Going to Somalia was like visiting the scene of a crime and finding that the murder was still there but the body had fled.

The problem in Somalia was more abstract. This was the first large-scale military operation in history to be launched for purely altruistic reasons.Nobody knew how to go about such a thing. In a war against hunger, what do you do? Shoot lunch?

These people (in the Somali refugee camp) were not starving: that is, they weren’t starving to death. Their misery had not quite reached the photogenic stage.

One of the reporters must have flunked journalism school because he asked a question that went straight to the point.

The sky was so clear that the starlight cast shadows, and so many sparkles and glitters and glints appeared above us that it looked like something really expensive had been dropped and shattered in heaven - God’s Steuben ashtray, maybe.

Before the marines came, the children were dying like . . . “Dying like flies” is not a simile you’d use in Somalia. The flies wax prosperous and lead full lives. Before the marines came, the children were dying like children.

The sky was a fine, light, equatorial blue with just a few tubby cumulus clouds as pretty as foam on a beer.

With altruistic enthusiasm born of undying love, the two of us could save a rain forest and a half. And rescue mountain ranges. And give the Heimlich maneuver to an occasional small continent.

The guide for my tour, Julio, came to get us in bus made of wood, like one of those arts-and-crafts-store toys that people without children give to kids.

The big sun and big clouds made dapples of Impressionism light on the water, and the breeze was as good as that moment in a noontime parking lot when the car AC finally kicks in.

One tennis court-sized screened area enclosed a dining room and a bar. Guitars leaning in a corner threatened folk music.

Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall gin-and-tonic is the way to save the planet. From a recumbent, and slightly buzzed, perspective, Mother Earth is a fine specimen of womanhood, a cutie.

There are antsas big as AA batteries and ants as small as, well, ants.

The intense, even NBA-like competition among living things in the rain forest means that almost every plant and animal has some kind of stinger, barb, thorn, prickle, spur, spine, poison, or angry advocacy group back in the United States boycotting your place of business.

A Jamaican fruit bat looks like a colonel in the rat air force. And it’s got a set of teeth on it that you could use to perform an appendectomy.

Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.

Estuarine dolphins look like slimmed-down versions of the Sea World type, as if Flipper’d been doing extra laps and had given up leaping for fish between meals.

It was a male frog, said Julio. He could tell because of the eggs. The eggs of the poison frog are carried on the male’s back. It’s a nineties, caring kind of poison frog.

A dugout is much superior to a conventional manufactured canoe because you can get soaking wet without bothering to capsize it.

Edward Abbey wrote a novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, about pro-bucolic activists who wreck construction machinery to stop progress and stuff. Abbey would be a saint to environmentalists if saints got recycled instead of going to heaven.

The original Greek Pan was born completely covered in hair, with a goat’s beard, hooves, and horns. His mother, the nymph Callisto, was so frightened that she ran off and left him to the care of whatever welfare agencies Olympus had.

Mankind is supposed to have evolved in the treetops. But I have examined my sense of balance, the prehensility of my various appendages, and my attitude toward standing on anything higher than, say, political principles, and I have concluded that, personally, I evolved in the backseat of a car.

I’ll bet Thoreau really was on drugs. It certainly is the easy way to make the ecosystem better, at least to look at. And drugs would excuse sentences like “I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.”

The brujo’s (male witch or shaman) spiritual cleansing ceremony was at least as tedious and lengthy as Methodist Sunday school. Most religious services seem to be so. Is ennui the sacrifice God wants us to make to Him?

Several trees along the shore were filled with the hanging nests of oropendolas, a tropical oriole that makes its own birdhouses from woven vines and twigs. And they are no better at it than kids taking a crafts program at summer camp.

The difference between a downpour in the temperate zone and a downpour in the trpics is the difference between stepping into the shower and being thrown into the pool. Or, rather, having the pool thrown on you. Imagine yourself standing in the deep end and all the water is on the high board.

I can think of a number of areas in New York where three acres of nuclear waste would make the neighborhood safer to walk around in than it is now, and better lit.

Thousands of Americans drown every year. Imagine – with the present age’s terror of hazards and enthusiasm for government protection therefrom – if water had just been invented. The Brady Bill would have included a five-day waiting period for above-ground pools; only licensed adults would be allowed to bathe, and children under fourteen would be required to wear life jackets when using squirt guns.

I love citing Science (the magazine) – anything so hard to read must be deeply wise.

Most of the research about species extinction has been conducted on island because islands are controlled environments and scientists can get drinks with little umbrellas in them there.

“Fully 87% of our paper stock,” says Jerry Taylor (Director of Natural Resource Studies at the Cato Institute), “comes from trees which are grown as a crop specifically for the purpose of paper production. Acting to ‘conserve trees’ through paper recycling is like acting to ‘conserve corn’ by cutting back on corn consumption.”

The road from there (Dresden) to Prague ran beside a rail bed. An unpleasant little coal-fired narrow-gauge locomotive lurched along the tracks, spewing stink. It would have caused the most stolid of nine-year-old boys to leave off model railroading and go play with dolls.

In America in 1991, $31.1 billion was spent on shoes, mostly by my ex-wife.

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.

People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don’t need politics, they have jobs.

When poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Ecological concerns are made more urgent and important by wrapping them in sacramental vestments. If it’s just a dead whale, then all it does is stink up the beach. But if it’s a martyred icon . . . Well, for starters, it outweights Jesus by twenty thousand pounds.

The best problem solvers are individuals. Many people acting independently are more intelligent than a few people acting as a group. It is the difference between Princeton University and the Princeton University football team.

Politicians don’t like facts, as any campaign speech proves.

George Bush was the goat (at the Earth Summit, 1992), of course, for insisting that a global-warming treaty contain something besides hot air.

The four of us trotted in a crouch – the soldier nimbly, the three reporters in the manner of circus elephants and making the trumpeting breath noises of chain smokers.

Generally it’s not a good idea to wear Banana Republic – type khaki journalist clothes in a war zone. You might look too much like something that’s supposed to be shot, such as a journalist.

You mustn’t ever ask the Yugoslavs why they’re fighting. They’ll tell you.

Even those of us who are savagely opposed to pacifism are tempted to grab the Yugoslavs by their fashionably padded shoulders and give them nonviolent what-for: “Even if you win, you assholes, all you’ve got is Yugoslavia! It’s not like you're invading France or something.”

Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked “What’s the big idea?” knows, most big ideas are bad ones.

All Third World slums are more terrible than the CNN videotapes can make them out to be. You can’t smell television.

Haiti’s abstract soapstone sculptures could give me a refresher course to Henry Moore, if he weren’t dead.

Haitians are law-abiding, when there is law to abide. Along the unmarvelous sidewalks of the Rue des Miracles, dozens of money changers stood with large wads of U.S. dollars in hand. “I’d like to see someone try that in New York City,” said Dumarsais, who once lived in Brooklyn.

“Why would we have crime in Haiti?” said Dumarsais. “We have the police and the army to do that for us.”

Haiti is integrated in a way not seen in the United States except in soft-drink television commercials.

Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.

Vietnamese food is like Chinese food prepared by a great French chef. No. That would mean frog fried rice and trying to get snails out of their shells with chopsticks.

Away from Hanoi the farms were still rich but the farmers not so much so. Houses were made from woven sticks or straw thatch or, sometimes, brick. The Three Little Pigs seemed to be the senior partners in the local architecture firm.

Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.

Fortunately Gianni and I were adhering to the two key rules of Third World travel:
1.. Never run out of whiskey.
2.. Never run out of whiskey.

Saigon has none of rural poverty’s loveliness, none of manual labor’s charm. Saigon is like all the other great modern cities of the world. It’s the mess left from people getting rich.

Traffic (in Saigon) was like a bad dog. It wasn’t important to look both ways when crossing the street; it was important to not show fear.

At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided with a stack of empty oil drums during a bird call contest.

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Humorous Quotes from P. J. O'Rourke's All The Trouble in The World

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Have you checked out this super book? Click Here

Humorous Quotes from P. J. O'Rourke's
All The Trouble in The World

Have you checked out
this super book?

Click Here