P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

We are all naturally xenophobic.

You tend to be afraid when someone seems foreign to you. But if you aren't careful, that can lead to bigotry.

In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's different.'

Ignorance breeds fear and hatred.

In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.

With most people, strangers are not only enemies, but inferiors.

This is why we have racism, really: because people are confronting the unknown, and they don't like that.

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.

These people hate the United States, not for what we do, but for who we are and what we are.

Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most.

It's not hard to look at our own world and draw parallels between 9/11, for example, and how Muslims are viewed or treated by North American culture since then. Just to see the way fear can breed hatred and intolerance for people who aren't the same as us - and that's certainly part of what's at the heart of 'Descender.'

Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one another.

Bigotry and judgment are the height of insecurity.

Or a White Englishman would rather smash a White Frenchman than a Jew! Crazy!

Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.

The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.

We have the tendency to condemn what we don't understand.

It is what people do not know that they persecute each other about.

Extremists and populist movements are exploiting people's fear of those who are not like us. We can see the consequences in the form of terrorism and racially motivated violence.

Religious-based and ethnic-based schools act as points of division in society, often breeding prejudice and fear …

The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain, and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character …. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.

I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.

Whoever kindles the flame of intolerance in America is lighting a fire underneath his own home.

There is again a rising fever and anger towards those seen as different.

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own