P. J. O'Rourke

Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.

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

Space has always been confusing to politics.

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

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

What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I've received a spam text.

There are a few things that people all around the world need to admit to themselves. Trade restraints slow economic growth, the euro is not a reserve currency, and scoreless sports ties are boring.

When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.

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

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool.

Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' is the family's practice as well as its theory. Even with today's scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree.

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.

The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.

I think that humor has become a principle means of communication among Americans about politics.