P. J. O'Rourke Quotes About America
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People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.
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The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborgini to the Gran Prix track to watch the charter buses race.
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I don't see evidence of America being a poorer country than it was 20 years ago. I've seen impoverished devastation. I've seen places where things had been good and now they were very bad.
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America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
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Each American embassy comes with two permanent features - a giant anti-American demonstration and a giant line for American visas. Most demonstrators spend half their time burning Old Glory and the other half waiting for green cards.
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Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is a case of bad men doing wrong things for wicked reasons. This is the full-sized or standard purebred evil and is easily recognized even by moral neophytes. Other malignities-drugs in America, famine in Africa and everything in the Middle East-are more complex. When combating those evils people sometimes have trouble deciding whom to shoot.
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The average IQ in America is—and this can be proven mathematically—average.
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West Germans are tall, pink, pert and orthodontically corrected, with hands, teeth and hair as clean as their clothes and clothes as sharp as their looks. Except for the fact that they all speak English pretty well, they're indistinguishable from Americans.
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The Democrats said, "We don't know what's wrong with America, but we can fix it." The Republicans said, "There's nothing wrong with America, and we can fix that."
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The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. Being a Republican, I'm backing Hillary Clinton. Because she could lose. The reason is not that she's a woman. The reason is that she's the particular woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in. Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is "America's ex-wife."
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It remains to be seen which program will cause greater societal damage: China's one-child policy or America's one-parent policy.
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Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.
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So-called Western Civilization, as practised in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western civilization not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to. Our civilization is the first in history to show even the slightest concern for average, undistinguished, none-too-commendable people like us.
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The Arab peoples possess an ancient and highly developed civilization that is in many ways more sophisticated than our own. For instance, they invented algebra. And this is why we have to go to war with Saddam Hussein this minute and bomb the shish kebab out of him before he invents trig and chemistry and the whole of America flunks high school.
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Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer -- a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.
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Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody? Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.
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The Greenpeace booth at all the rock and roll shows nowadays are akin to the old sorcerers who used to stand in the middle of villages warning of danger, 'When night wolf swallows mother moon, there will be great famine.'
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America is the world's policeman, all right -- a big, dumb, mick flatfoot in the middle of the one thing cops dread most, a "domestic disturbance.
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This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans.
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This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.
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I covered the Lebanese civil war. I could see a place that had once been prosperous and now was impoverished. I'm not seeing that in America.
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America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don't think that way. We don't think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you've got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags.
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Rich white Protestant men have held on to some measure of power in America almost solely by getting women, blacks, and other disadvantaged groups to wear crippling foot fashions. This keeps them too busy with corns and bunions to compete in the job market.
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It is easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite pet. People like pets to possess the same qualities they do. Cats are irresponsible and recognize no authority, yet are completely dependent on others for their material needs. Cats cannot be made to do anything useful. Cats are mean for the fun of it. In fact, cats possess so many of the same qualities as people that it is often hard to tell the people and the cats apart.
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In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor.
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With the war in Iraq, I had the cooperation of the Department of Defense. Kuwait was pretty eager to get American journalists in there, to show us what a wonderful place they are, and what great allies they are to America, even though they didn't actually fight in the war.
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Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.
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Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite poet. People like poets to possess the same qualities they do.
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Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in.
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The Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns'n'Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance brokerin America who owns a pair of white shoes.
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