Today’s the birthday of one of my favorite writers, P.J. O’Rourke (1947). I’ve been reading him ever since I graduated from Mad Magazine to The National Lampoon, and followed his work in books with hard covers such as Republican Party Reptile, All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death, and Eat the Rich. He’s the kind of writer I’d like to be when I grow up, even though there’s little evidence that he’s done so.

Whenever I’ve found a particularly funny or trenchant sentence or two I’ve thrown it into a file for future reference. In honor of P.J.’s birthday, here are a few of them:

• When a thing defies physical law, there’s usually politics involved.
• Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
• The forces of safety are afoot in the land. I, for one, believe it is a conspiracy – a conspiracy of Safety Nazis shouting “Sieg Health” and seeking to trammel freedom, liberty, and large noisy parties. The Safety Nazis advocate gun control, vigorous exercise, and health foods. The result can only be a disarmed, exhausted, and half-starved population ready to acquiesce to dictatorship of some kind.
• Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.
• If you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.
• Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever’s special to them. These two groups bring great pressure to bear upon politicians who have another agenda yet: to cater to the temporary whims and fads of the public and the press.
• Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.
• A little Government and a little luck are necessary in life; but only a fool trusts either of them.
• Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the “baby boom”, a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, “Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!” This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions – North and South, black and white, labor and management – but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.
• Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.
• To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.
• The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then gets elected and proves it.
• Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty – their power and privilege – to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by … politicians.
• People with a mission to save the earth want the earth to seem worse than it is so their mission will look more important.
• When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it is (certain body parts excepted) done away with. But a public entity gets bigger.

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