P. J. O'Rourke

Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.

Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.

Jimmy Carter was - he still - he remains to this day America's most ex of ex-presidents. You just can't believe that we elected this doofus. He was a bright enough guy and sort of well-meaning. But he was about as prepared to be president of the United States as your goofy old uncle, you know, the one that memorises baseball statistics.

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

America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.

Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.

People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'

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

Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.

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

Americans are good at pursuing happiness. And the Americans who pursue happiness most diligently show that we're also good at running it down and killing it.

Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.