Quotes from P. J. O'Rourke

I rarely meet a politician that I don't like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.

As murderous industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald's.

Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.

Maybe the real secret to America's greatness is that we hate one another.

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.

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.

Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn't matter.

President Bush said that if illegal immigrants want citizenship, they'd have to do three things: pay taxes, hold meaningful jobs, and learn English. Bush doesn't meet those qualifications.

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.

I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.

Fashionably amusing table manners are a matter of breaking the right rule at the right time.

The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.

Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

After the events of the 20th century, God, quite reasonably, left Europe. But He's still here in the United States.

Gay marriage acceptance is happening in the blink of an eye.

I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.

Chinese economic development has cost many American workers their jobs. That's the price of progress.

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.

Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree.

By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.

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

Only a few good leaders have paused to reflect seriously on being leaders.

Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.