P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Divorce, and broken marriages, are all around us, but they're not frequently depicted on screen, or if they are, they're often depicted in ways that have very little to do with reality.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

Alcohol remained, and remains, a vital instrument of social control, used without any regard to its horrifying consequences in addiction and violence.

Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you are a millionaire conservative radio jock, which makes it an illness and needs our prayers for your recovery.

Immorality, violence, and divorce, with their accompanying sorrows, plague society worldwide.

The root causes of the gang culture lie right across the policy spectrum - but they can all be found in the same areas geographically: worklessness; family breakdown; educational failure and addiction.

There is no evidence to show that prohibition has ever had its intended impact. Of course, just as banning beef has reduced beef consumption, banning alcohol will lead to reduced alcohol consumption. But, there appears to be little or no correlation between, say, domestic violence or household impoverishment and prohibition.

For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels.

The world will tolerate many vices, but not their diminutives.

Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?

Every generation finds the drug it needs.

Rush Limbaugh, who has made a career preaching that anybody who does drugs has got to go right to jail - do not pass go, no questions asked, right to jail - gets caught doing thirty oxycontin a day. Thirty oxycontin?! Do you have any idea how high that is?! I don't, and I've been pretty high!

He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.

The vices we scoff at in others laugh at us within ourselves.

My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed which I could lecture against.

We tend to see our character flaws as simple defects, and the simple defects of others as character flaws.

Thousands of years people have taken drugs, whether it's alcohol, which was invented about 5,000 years ago. People have been using that. And all kinds of marijuana and all these things, tobacco. So all these drugs have been - it seems to be the propensity of human beings to want to use them.

I found myself being more and more involved with people who were rejected by society - with drug addicts, alcoholism, battered this, battered that - and I found an affinity there.

Working with drug addicts, alcoholics, and so-called juvenile delinquents in New York City convinced me that instead of working with individuals, more effective methods would deal with the societal conditions that create dysfunctional behaviors in the first place.

That's what I hate about the war on drugs. All day long we see those commercials: "Here's your brain, here's your brain on drugs", "Just Say No", "Why do you think they call it dope?" … And then the next commercial is [singing] "This Bud's for yooouuuu." C'mon, everybody, let's be hypocritical bastards. It's okay to drink your drug. We meant those other drugs. Those untaxed drugs. Those are the ones that are bad for you.

It's fine to criticize somebody else's crimes and misdeeds, but you don't talk about your own. The only exception is a country that is defeated. And even that is rather nuanced.

I think narcotics and alcohol, and even tobacco are enormously costly ingredients in our society.

I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I’ve guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol… there’s really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why.

We won't dispassionately investigate or rationally debate which drugs do what damage and whether or how much of that damage is the result of criminalization. We'd rather work ourselves into a screaming fit of puritanism and then go home and take a pill.