Quotes from P. J. O'Rourke

The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.

There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.

Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization - an appeal to civilization itself.

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.

There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.

I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.

Detroit is beautiful - though you probably have to be a child of the industrial Midwest, like me, to see it.

Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let's hope so.

I've only been to New Zealand once, about 1989. It was incredibly beautiful, kind of like the ideal of where I live in New England - all that and then some - but I can't say I was there long enough to get any very clear idea.

Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone.

The people who despise America are the editors of the 'New Statesman.' Their green-card applications must have been turned down.

We've come into the world of '1984,' but it turns out to be '1984'-Lite.

I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.

The American political system is like fast food - mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things and everybody wants some.

Coffee and cigarettes are much better if you want an instant breakfast.

I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.

Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that brightens life.

All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.

America's public schools have served their purpose. Free and compulsory education was good for a somewhat unpromising young nation.

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.

Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.