P. J. O'Rourke

“If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions.”

“Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.”

“I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.”

“I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.”

“The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.”

“Disney's Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative.”

“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.”

“I'm a political conservative.”

“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.”

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

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

“There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It's going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it's the Democrats.”

“Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.”

“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.”

“We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren't there.”

“Something that confirms all fears and many conspiracy theories about government is finding out what our elected representatives would put into law if they could.”

“There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.”

“I have never been to a museum in Hong Kong, or a movie or a play. I've never gone club-hopping. I've never taken the tram to Victoria Peak.”

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

“Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.”