P. J. O'Rourke

A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It's a promissory note that doesn't actually promise anything. It's not backed by gold or silver.

I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I'm not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.

Nobody is making Americans buy Chinese goods.

President Bush said that if illegal immigrants want citizenship, they'd have to do three things: pay taxes, hold meaningful jobs, and learn English. Bush doesn't meet those qualifications.

Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them.

Jack Abramoff is the world's best lobbyist - for the Federal Penitentiary System.

Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.

Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.

A deadly sins addendum is long overdue. Life has changed since Pope Gregory the Great scribbled his initial list in the sixth century.

The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind.

Politicians will talk strategy and tactics and policies and programs until they're blue in the face, or you strangle them and they turn blue.

Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the liberal elite. And we can't blame taxpayers for being reluctant to subsidize the reportorial careers of J-school twerps who should have joined the Peace Corps and gone to Africa to 'speak truth to power' to Robert Mugabe.

Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.

Philosophy was once considered science.

The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.

There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.

America's grossly unfair tax system won't lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief.

I don't mind America becoming a Third World country. The weather is better in the Third World than it is where I live in New Hampshire. And household help will be much cheaper.

I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with their constituents. The electorate now has instant information about what politicians have been up to.

I have never Twittered or Tweeted or even Chirped.

Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.

I live in rural New Hampshire, and we are, frankly, short on people who are black, gay, Jewish, and Hispanic. In fact, we're short on people. My town has a population of 301.

Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.

We all know the types who listen to Pete Seeger songs; even Pete admits they aren't interesting.

As murderous industrial magnates go, Alfred Nobel is right up there with Ray Kroc, franchiser of McDonald's.

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

No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.

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

The District of Columbia is an extreme example of disconnect between financial input and educational outcome. Unfortunately, extreme is not the same as abnormal.

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.

Californians are people who insist on growing their own vegetables, but they won't dig up the pretty lawn, won't plant anything for fear of getting dirty, and they use fragrant bath salts from The Body Shop instead of smelly compost.

There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans: race and religion.

The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay.

Everybody in America who didn't come over the Bering Strait ice bridge stole his land from somebody else.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

Upbeat is for people who want to feel good about their cause: the reformers, the progressives, the revolutionaries, the utopians, the collectivists, and the rest of the altruistic scum of the earth. Why do these people want to feel good? They want to feel good in order to convince themselves that they are good.

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.

Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heros.

A person has got to balance work and life and family in order to be a balanced person.

TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.

A 'farm' today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall.

Liberals consider people to be nuisances.

The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.

Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the Left.

Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.

We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world.

I don't understand anything about America's culture.

Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.

To blame the existence of al Qaeda on poverty like Egypt's is a slur on the poor.