By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.

— P. J. O'Rourke

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.

— P. J. O'Rourke

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

— P. J. O'Rourke

Cars let us out of the barn and, while they were at it, destroyed the American nuclear family. As anyone who has had an American nuclear family can tell you, this was a relief to all concerned.

— P. J. O'Rourke

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.

— P. J. O'Rourke

Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.

— P. J. O'Rourke

Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.

— P. J. O'Rourke

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.

— 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.

— P. J. O'Rourke

Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.

— P. J. O'Rourke