P. J. O'Rourke

If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.

Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.

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.

Fascism is very much a mob movement.

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

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.

Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren't present.

The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.

It's better to make fun of yourself because you've always got someone around to make fun of, and they can't sue you.

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.

I live in New Hampshire. We're in favor of global warming. Eleven hundred more feet of sea-level rises? I've got beachfront property. You tell us up there, 'By the end of the century, New York City could be underwater,' and we say, 'Your point is?'

Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.

I'm not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling.

Rich people don't like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don't go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.

The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.

Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

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

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.

Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.

Detroit's industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.

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

Love can never be fully explained.

Of all the American educational system's problems, none is more severe than the academic year beginning before Labor Day.

In midlife, we're as dumb as we get.

Until I carried my wife off to New Hampshire, she defined wilderness as the Bronx.

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.

The purpose of sports - even foreign sports - is not to bore people.

The one thing that's terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.

Toledo is better than exciting, it's happy. Because nothing is more conducive to unhappiness than taking yourself seriously, and taking yourself seriously is difficult when you're baseball team is the Mud Hens.

There is no horizon in Toledo. There are too many trees.

In Toledo, people grow out. Out to the suburbs. Out to the parts of America where the economy is more vigorous. And all too often, out to 48-inch waistbands.

Northwest Ohio is flat. There isn't much up. The land is so flat that a child from Toledo is under the impression that the direction hills go is down. Sledding is done down from street level into creek beds and road cuts.

The Tea Party has definitely increased political involvement, not only among Tea Party members but among people who oppose the Tea Party members. It's been a general stimulus.

When I'm in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.

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

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

A lot of newspaper columns used to be written in a rat-a-tat-tat, fast-paced style - and they tended to be funny. They were a little relief from the grimmer, grayer parts of the newspaper, and one of the best people at doing this was Will Rogers.

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.

Writing is agony. I hate it.

A fundamental American question is, 'What's the big idea?'

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God.

America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being 'hegemonistic', of engaging in 'unilateralism', of behaving as if we're the only nation on earth that counts. We are.

We have the British motor industry as a role model for what happens when you try to save an industrial dinosaur. Britain was the first country to industrialise and the first to de-industrialise. We should learn from this.

A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitches. It's as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the 'Iliad' while playing a lyre.

As a longtime former resident of 15 years in Washington, I wish that everybody would stay off the Mall with their political cause so that we can get out there, you know, and play flag football or Frisbee, or walk the dog or something - you know, which is, you know, what the National Mall should be for, in my personal opinion.

If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words 'I don't know.'

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.

I don't watch much television.