Humorous Quotes from
Holidays in Hell
By P. J. O'Rourke

On Saturday, June 8, 1867, the steamship Quaker City left New York harbor. On board was a group of Americans making the world’s first package tour. Also on board was Mark Twain making the world’s first fun of package tourism.

At least we American tourists understand English when it’s spoken loudly and clearly enough.

If the Japanese want to be taken seriously as world financial powers, they’d better quit using the same tailor as variety show chimps.

Modern air travel means less time spent in transit. That time is now spent in transit lounges.

There are “local points of interest” available until the real monuments are restored. These are small piles of stones about which someone will tell you extravagant lies for five dollars. (“And here, please, the Tomb of the Infant Jesus.”)

(Visited) France in August when you can travel through the entire country without encountering a single pesky Frenchman or being bothered with anything that’s open for business.

Each American embassy comes with two permanent features – a giant anti-American demonstration and a giant line for American visas. Most demonstrators spend half their time burning Old Glory and the other half waiting for green cards.

You can experience most of the indignities and discomforts of travel in your own hometown, wherever you live.

I visited Lebanon in the fall of ’84, which turned out to be pretty much the last time an American could travel in that country with only a risk (rather than a certainty) of being kidnapped.

Everybody with a gun has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon you’d be crazy not to have a gun. Though, I assure you, all the crazy people have guns, too.

The interesting thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is where the bullet comes out, yet what a big difference it would make in your social schedule.

Be sure to tip the man who insists, at gunpoint, on guarding your car.

Wherever you go, it’s important to leave early in the morning. Those who think the war is dangerous have not seen the traffic in Beirut.

It’s a city (Beirut) of a million people with three stoplights and these aren’t working.

The beach is now an Amnal military base under heavy guard because it’s next to the orthodox Shiite women’s bathing area. They wear ankle-length chadors in the water, which may explain the lack of a world-class Shiite women’s swim team.

No one in sight, as far as I could tell, was in charge of anything but pistol waving.

Serious gunmen favor the rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, which is something like a bazooka. It’s inaccurate and tremendously noisy, a perfect Lebanese weapon.

I asked her what all the shooting was about. “Oh,” she said, “that’s just Lebanese for ‘please queue up.’”

“What’s Arabic for ‘calm down’?” I yelled. “As far as I can tell,” said Miss Phillips, “there’s no such word.”

Lebanese are the only people in the world who pronounce French worse than Americans.

Syrian checkpoint stories are the Polish jokes of Lebanon.

Taking hashish out of the country without payoffs is one of the few crimes they still prosecute in Lebanon.

The store looked like it hadn’t been visited since the Crusades, except all the ancient artifacts were new, made this month and buried in the yard for a week.

The nonsense you hear about bargaining in the Orient is, like most nonsense about the Orient, perfectly true. I had not been in the shop three seconds before the owner was quoting prices that would do justice to a Pentagon parts supplier and flopping greasy, ill-made rugs in every director.

Korean sounds like ack-ack fire, every syllable has a primary accent: YO-YO CAMP STOVE HAM HOCK DIP STICK DUCK SOUP HAT RACK PING-PONG LIP SYNC!!!!

A Korean political party exists solely to boost the fortunes of its founding candidate and has the average life span of a trout-stream mayfly hatch.

I guess democracy is something that if you’re going to be really up-to-date, you just cant do without – like a compact-disc player.

The city (Seoul) is as gray as a parking garage and cleaner than a living room.

The voting was just what every journalist dreads, quiet and well organized. There were no Salvadoran shoot-'em-ups, no Haitian baton-twirler machete attacks, no puddles of Chicagoan sleaze running out from under the voting booths.

The Han is as wide as the Hudson, and its valley is as beautiful as a Hudson River-school painting.

This (Korea) is a whole nation of people who did their homework on Friday night. Even when they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re doing so damn much of it they they’re still going to get an A.

One pair, a dog-faced, grousing fat girl in glasses and a weedy, mouthy, fever-eyed boy, were almost as obnoxious as my girlfriend and I were twenty years ago at the march on the Pentagon.

The building had been fought over inch by inch. Every stick of furniture was destroyed, every breakable thing was broken. This was Korea, however – the bathrooms were still spotless.

(In Panama) When the opposition wants to stage a mass rally it calls for a “White Caravan,” and everyone drives through town with the air conditioning on. If people can't make it, they send the maid.

The government cheats a bit with its anti-demonstration demonstrations, handing out gas money and giving public employees the day off then taking roll call at the rally.

Torrijos also managed, after decades of negotiations, to wrest to a new canal treaty from the United States. Admittedly, he wrested it from Jimmy Carter, so it isn’t like he played against the varsity, but it gave the Panamanians a patriotic thrill to get the middle of their country back.

Taxi drivers all over the world, by the way, are under Newspaper Guild contract to give easy quotes to foreign correspondents.

What would be a road hazard any place else, in the Third World is probably the road.

Most developing nations use international traffic symbols. Americans may find themselves perplexed by road signs that look like Boy Scout merit badges and by such things as an iguana silhouette with a red diagonal bar across it. Don’t worry, the natives don’t know what they mean, either.

It’s important to understand that in the Third World most driving is done with the horn.

There are two kinds of military road blocks, the kind where you slow down so they can look you over, and the kind where you come to a full stop so they can steal your luggage.

Horrible things go into hot dogs. But in this hot dog you could taste them all.

What ails Poland is, as the Poles say, “fatal but not serious.”

A nation’s fun will tell you more about that nation than anything except its jails. And, if I got into enough fun, maybe I'd get into jail too.

“Do you know why the police have dogs?” said Tom in English as he smiled pleasantly at the cop. “Somebody has to do the brain work.”

(in Warsaw) There was a mild strip act, the stripper winding up in the kind of two-piece bathing suit worn by Baptist ministers’ wives, but with sequins.

To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, event the sleaze.

(in Warsaw) The dancing was terrible, stiff and clunky like spilling a can of Tinkertoys. There’s a tragic lack of black people behind the Iron Curtain, which explains the dancing. “The only ethnic group we ever had was Jews,” said Zofia, “and they only dance in circles.”

Communism doesn’t really starve or execute that many people. Mostly it just bores them to death.

(At the Heritage USA) There are playgrounds, kiddie rides, bridle paths, tennis courts and swimming pools, where I guess you have to lose faith at least temporarily or you’ll just stand around on top of the water.

I almost don’t have the heart to make fun of these folks. It’s like hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle and scope.

I’ve always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He’d have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with.

“You know what you’ve got here (At the Heritage USA)?” I said to Dorothy. “This is white trash behaving itself – the only thing in the world worse than white trash not behaving itself.”

Something is drawing forlorn old ladies and poor, morose families to Heritage USA. Five million of them came in 1985. It can't be Jesus doing a thing like that. He’s compassionate guy, isn’t He?

At the back of one of the albums, folded behind a flap of paper, were pictures of Philippine women – dark, smooth, small, beautiful women who seemed to have misplaced their bathing suits.

There was an austerely dignified award ceremony. By that I mean we had to buy our own drinks – in clear violation of the international journalists’code of truth, fairness and an open bar.

Cory Aquino is the most upright, kindly and honorable person running a country today. Given the other people running countries, that's probably safe to say.

Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport – two armed entrees battling to see who’ll be dinner.

What Cory had done so far in the Phillipines was magic, but a very mild kind of magic, like pulling a rabbit out of a rabbit hutch.

El Salvador has the scenery of northern California and the climate of southern California plus – and this was a relief – no Californians.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a real boat reporter. My Rolex isn’t big enough.

If the wind is blowing like stink and everything is working right, a twelve-meter sailboat can go eleven and a half or twelve miles an hour, the same speed at which a bond lawyer runs around the Cental Park Reservoir.

The America’s Cup is like driving your Lamborgini to the Gran Prix track to watch the charter buses race.

There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.

In Western Australia they don’t even know how to make that vital piece of sailboating equipment, the gin and tonic.

Australia is not very exclusive. On the visa application they still ask if you’ve been convicted of a felony – although they are willing to give you a visa even if you haven’t been.

A great national debate has started about where the next America’a Cup race should be held. Let me be the first to suggest Aspen. I’ll bet these twelve-meters go like a bitch downhill.

Harvard is the home of American ideas; there have been several of these, and somebody has to take the blame for them.

A question-and-answer period followed. I asked myself the question, “What am I doing here?” and left.

Let anybody have whatever he can afford. If he can afford political power, let him have that too.

The big game is disappearing from Africa. Most Africans have never seen a rhino in its natural state (which is a state of mild pique, I believe)

Rhinos only occasionally kill for fun and never go to the U.N. afterward and say they did it because of American imperialism or communist subversion.

At Epcot Center the Disney corporation has focused its attention on two things greatly in need of Disneyfication: the tedious future and the annoying whole wide world.

The future is a quagmire of micro-chips. They’ll connect your television to somebody’s typewriter, and, if you can't score a million at Donkey Kong, you’ll be out of work.

Walt is dead. And, after a couple of hours at Epcot, you'll wish you were, too.

Visiting Future World is like opening a Chinese fortune cookie to read, “Soon you’ll be finished with dinner.”

If Disney still wants to make Epcot Center futuristic, they could do so by blowing the place up with an atom bomb.

You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.

One by one and man to man Arabs are the salt of the earth – generous, hospitable, brave, wise, and so forth. But get you in a pack and shove a Koran down your pants and you act like a footlocker full of glue sniffing civet cats.

One of these suburbs is actually named Stalingrad, which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793.

Germans respond well to lies. At least, they always have historically.

There are probably more fact-finding tours of Nicaragua right now than there are facts – the country has shortages of practically everything.

I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to hell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.

I like the guy (Alejandro Bendana) – a bad sign. People I like shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near government.

They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it. - Nelba Blandon, Interior Ministry Director of Censorship, quoted in The New York Times, 1984

These guys were so boring that I’m amazed they haven’t all been hired as George Bush speech writers.

A summit conference is as interesting as a second cousin’s wedding. Some stuff goes on that we might like a peek at, but it goes on behind locked doors. What we get to see is the bride and groom walking down the aisle.

It was to be a short visit for the G-shevs. More than four days in the U.S. and Raisa’s VISA card bill would shatter the fragile Soviet economy.

Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please.

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.

The commies are the only people on earth who think Star Wars will work. If they’re that gullible, maybe we should have held the summit at Atlantic City and let them lose all their missiles playing Keno.

The Russians could have some (warheads) aimed at Japan, so if we act up they can destroy our economy.

I arrived in the middle of a press conference – as boring a thing to sit through if you don’t know the language as it is if you do.

To put it in Protestant American terms: throwing a tear gas grenade into the al-Aksa Mosque on a sabbath was like attacking the Pebble Beach golf course with Agent Orange on a Sunday in June.

Personally, I believe a brilliant future awaits the Third World, a future filled with peace, prosperity, health and happiness, a future that the people of the Third World will reach, um . . . the moment they die and go to heaven.

But in the next quarter century the most dramatic change in the Third World will be the United States becoming a part of it.

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Humorous Quotes from Holidays in HellBy P. J. O'Rourke

Have you checked out this super book? Click Here

Have you checked out this super book? Click Here

Humorous Quotes from
Holidays in Hell
By P. J. O'Rourke

Have you checked out
this super book?

Click Here

Have you checked out
this super book?

Click Here