P. J. O'Rourke

The 18,000 NASA employees are full of galactic talents and abilities and are ready to accomplish whatever they're directed to do.

Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-'60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate.

Space has always been confusing to politics.

The words 'Space Age' have a quaint, nostalgic tone - sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching 'The Jetsons.'

'You're stupid,' is not something even his most severe critics usually say to President Barack Obama.

I know quite a few fellow members of the news analysis and commentary business, and I have it from the highest-placed sources, on the record, that each and every one of our children is a genius.

Call a man 'ignorant,' and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.

Stupid is a great force in human affairs.

Obama's space policy doesn't differ much from George W. Bush's.

Demolishing pretensions, especially worthy ones, is a hallmark of the baby boom.

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.

The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.

Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.

President Obama has contempt for real money.

Obama, in pursuit of power, has been as greedy and irresponsible as any Wall Street tycoon in pursuit of money.

I just wasn't cut out to be a Chinese Tiger Mom. I'm more of an Irish Setter Dad.

For decades in America, there has been an effort to ensure that the rights of those who are not sane are the same as the rights of those who are.

In a free country, government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference.

Democrats hate Democrats most of all.

Democrats hate success.

Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference.

If you spend 72 hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. Either that or you're President Obama.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.

I have never Twittered or Tweeted or even Chirped.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

Philosophy was once considered science.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.