P. J. O'Rourke

"The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids."

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."

"I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal."

"On inspection, Gaudi's architecture isn't whimsical at all."

"The killjoys initiated automobile crash standards so rigorous that we can't buy a car that hasn't been dropped from the top of a phone pole with our whole family strapped inside."

"We loved cars until the '70s or so. Then they became appliances. They turned into motorized cup holders. Most of it has to do with urban sprawl. What began as pleasure ends up in necessity, as so many things do."

"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."

"A very quiet and tasteful way to be famous is to have a famous relative. Then you can not only be nothing, you can do nothing too."

"Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman."

"Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants."

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

"Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."

"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."

"Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering."

"Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue."

"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."

"Conservatives really don't believe in politics as the primary instrument of getting along in life and therefore don't tend to put their energy into it a way people left of center do."

"Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats."

"Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed."

"Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective."

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

"I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a 'learning experience.' Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a 'learning experience.' It makes me feel less stupid."

"I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics."

"Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy."

"If death weren't around to 'finalize' the Darwinian process, we'd all still be amoebas."

"In Israel, waves of anger and fear circulate all the time, but so do jokes and gossip and silky evening breezes. So, too, in America."

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

"Is Bill Clinton so good at politics, or are other politicians so bad?"

"Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude."

"Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease."

"Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it."

"People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans."

"People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth."

"Politics is a necessary evil, or a necessary annoyance, a necessary conundrum."

"Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit."

"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."

"Some day you will be wheeled in for a heart bypass operation, and a surgeon will be the person who is now behind the counter when you renew your car registration at the department of motor vehicles."

"Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce."

"Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland."

"The best and brightest don't go into politics. The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs."

"The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin."

"The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable."

"The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich."

"The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff."

"The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken."

"The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen."

"The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee."