P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Just able barely to mount a horse and ride about a little in the spring of 1866, my life was threatened daily, and I was forced to go heavily armed. The whole country was then full of militia, robbing, plundering and killing.

The war is coming to the streets of America and if you are not keeping and bearing and practicing with your arms then you will be helpless and you will be the victim of evil.

Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.

The clatter of arms drowns out the voice of law.

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.

There is no greater evil than anarchy.

The only real power comes out of a long rifle.

One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.

Beirut turned into a war zone in a matter of hours. We were stuck at home, the roads were blocked.

It is then a very unseasonable time to plead law, when swords are in the hands of the vulgare, or to think to restrain them with fear of punishments when they look after liberty and shake off all government.

Yemen is one of the most dangerous spots in the world.

If you live in America, you need a gun, and I am not very fast with a gun, so I think I would walk out very quickly.

Albania in 1994 was the strangest place I've ever seen. It was like walking into the looking glass: falling apart, paranoid people, anarchy, no one farming, full of thieves. It was beyond any Third World country. They were living in their own private nightmare.

The Hell's Angels try not to do anything halfway, and anyone who deals in extremes is bound to cause trouble, whether he means to or not. This, along with a belief in total retaliation for any offense or insult, is what makes the Hell's Angels unmanageable for the police and morbidly fascinating to the general public.

Iraq is in a civil war. There is no road in that country that is safe.

Somalia is very dangerous, and no one knows that better than I.

The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will loose.

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

When anarchy is declared, the first thing we do, let's kill all the anarchists.

All together, we know for many years that terror is the most dangerous thing for local, regional and international stability.

Americans need never fear their government because of the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.

We are losing each day an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.

Like crime, terrorism is a fact of life. I grew up in Israel, where every unattended bag was a suspected bomb; when my family moved for a few years, it was to London in the early years of 'the Troubles.'

The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.

If nothing happens, if we just keep doing what we're doing, tomorrow is not certain. We will see families killing each other. We will see chaos in the country. The day after tomorrow will disappear.... The next civil war in Burundi will absolutely be over land.