P. J. O'Rourke

Soldiers are not policemen, and it's very unfair, even for those soldiers who have some police training, to burden them with police duties. It's not what they're trained for, or equipped for.

Stupid is a great force in human affairs.

Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.

Voting has proliferated in the United States, and it has reached a point where there is now almost one vote available per citizen over the age of eighteen.

Even Jimmy Carter can't be wrong all the time.

You can't destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America's elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you're doing us a favor.

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.

Politics is the one field you don't age out of.

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

There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.

The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.

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.