P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

It is an inconvenience, being located in a city where taxes are ludicrously high, where you pay twice your annual income to rent an apartment that could easily be carried on a commercial airline flight.

For years, I had a top secret clearance and never left Russia. Just once did I go to Bulgaria with my wife for a holiday at the Golden Sands resort, but I could not mention my real name. I was allowed to travel abroad only in the early 1990s.

Perestroika is our last chance. If we stop, it will be our death.

Even today the Soviet Union cannot even feed itself.

The Soviet union was quite good at developing heavy industry, transportation, and large scale enterprises. It was very bad at producing consumer goods including the food that people must eat. That was its great economic weakness.

We were appreciating as early as 1978 that the Soviet economy was in serious trouble. We didn’t make the leap that we should have made – I could have made, that the economic trouble would lead to political trouble. We thought that they would tighten their belt under a Stalin-like regime and continue marching on.

I once did a film in Russia because I wanted to see what the hell was going on there.

Many people are surprised to hear that we have comedians in Russia, but they are there. They are dead, but they are there.

Our first stop was red square, the heart of Moscow - if Moscow has one.

I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.

In Moscow they do not pay much attention to the living but keep their cemeteries in a splendid state.

[In Moscow] we got through to [Soviet leaders] Brezhnev and Kosygin on the telephone. I think it was because nobody had ever tried to call them at home before.

Mr. Gorbachev has apparently stumbled onto one of the best-kept secrets in recent Soviet history: Communism doesn't work.

A great deal of the pupils time was spent going through, once again, the History of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union. He had learnt it at elementary school; at secondary school; at his sports club; at the Komsomol; at the university; at a folk dancing course; at the chess-club.

It had never occurred to us that the Kremlin's new anti-booze campaign would apply to journalists. Now, that's a human-rights violation.

There is no income tax in Russia. But there's no income.

The Soviet Union at this time was being run by the Communists, a group of men fierce in their dedication to wearing hilariously bad suits. Their leader was Josef Stalin (Russian for "Joey Bananas")

Flying from the United States to Tokyo takes approximately as long as law school.

We had a very successful trip to Russia. We made it back.

In Russia, if a male athelete loses he becomes a female athelete.

The Olympic movement simply cannot allow the Russians to become estranged, because Russia is a vital part of the world sports community, in the sense of having nuclear missiles.

The workers love Khrushchev very much. He hasn't got an enemy in the entire country. Quite a few under it.

England is a very popular foreign country to visit because the people there speak some English.

The borrower runs in his own debt.

The Russians will never be able to get their missiles thought the dense protective layer of delayed flights circling over the United States in complex, puke-inducing holding patterns.