Mike Royko Quotes

It's much harder to be a liberal than a conservative. Why? Because it is easier to give someone the finger than a helping hand.

It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.

Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn't the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.

A Pessimist sees the glass as half empty; A Cub Fan wonders when it's gonna spill.

Strict gun laws are about as effective as strict drug laws...It pains me to say this, but the NRA seems to be right: The cities and states that have the toughest gun laws have the most murder and mayhem.

If God dislikes gays so much, how come he picked Michelangelo, a known homosexual, to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling while assigning Anita Bryant to go on television and push orange juice?

For some people, being free means being free to keep their feet on someone else's chest.

Why do you think the lottery is so popular? Do you think anybody would play if the super payoff was a job on the night shift in a meat-packing plant? People play it so if they win they can be rich and idle. Like I told you years ago - if work is so good, how come they have to pay us to do it?

Newspapers, magazines and other publications have the constitutional right to be offensive, even disgusting. As evidence of that, just watch this space regularly.

The subject of criminal rehabilitation was debated recently in City Hall. It's an appropriate place for this kind of discussion because the city has always employed so many ex-cons and future cons.

When I conducted a beer-rating session last year, I wrote that most American beers taste as if they were brewed through a horse. That offended many people in the American beer industry, as well as patriots who thought I was being subversive in praising foreign beers. I have just read a little-known study of American beers. So I must apologize to the horse. At least with a horse, we'd know what we're getting.

God tipped the country and all the fruits and nuts rolled west.

It's unnatural for people to run around the city streets unless they are thieves or victims. It makes people nervous to see someone running. I know that when I see someone running on my street, my instincts tell me to let the dog go after him.

Contrary to popular belief. It's much wiser to take money from the poor than the rich.

Anyone who gives a surgeon six thousand dollars for breast augmentation should give some thought to investing a little more in brain augmentation.

Whether one eats a cat or not is a personal choice, and I don't want to sway anyone one way or another. But if you do, there is one obvious cooking tip: Always remember to remove the bell from the cat's collar before cooking.

All that proves is that most of the world is too poor to build bowling alleys, golf courses, tennis courts and baseball fields. There's hundreds of millions of poor people out there who still ain't got indoor plumbing, but that don't mean there's something great about an outhouse. Soccer is boring. I've never seen a more boring sport.

Reagan's approach will achieve one of the basic goals of the conservative: Things remain basically the same. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, or even a little poorer.

I never went to a John Wayne movie to find a philosophy to live by or to absorb a profound message. I went for the simple pleasure of spending a couple of hours seeing the bad guys lose.

In attacking the young, the liberal, and the black, Daley was in the mainstream of America's mass prejudices. The Democratic party may have suffered by his actions, but Daley came out...even more popular than before because bust their heads was the mood of the land and Daley had swung the biggest club.

Hating the Yankees is as American as pizza pie, unwed mothers, and cheating on your income tax.

Hollywood has always been political. They consider it their right and duty to tell us what is politically good and right.

Forty years ago, we were on the tail of the Front Page era. There was a different point of view. Reporters and editors were more forgiving of public people. They didn't think they had to stick someone in jail to make a career.

When Michael Jordan quit, I suddenly found myself without a sports hero.

When I asked him how long he had been driving a taxi, he said, Dree mouse.