P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.

You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!

The root of war is fear.

When people go at war they cheapen things.

It is fear which leads us to war, ... It is fear which leads us to believe that we must kill or be killed. Fear which leads us to attack those who have not attacked us. Fear which leads us to ring our nation in the very heavens with weapons of mass destruction.

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

At the beginning of this century, people never questioned the effectiveness of war, never thought there could be real peace. Now, people are tired of war and see it as ineffective in solving anything.

I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!

The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.

And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars - all over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose - there is no such war in the history of the race."

Why is war such an easy option? Why does peace remain such an elusive goal? We know statesmen skilled at waging war, but where are those dedicated enough to humanity to find a way to avoid war

War is only an invention, not a biological necessity.

War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and not--I am not dreaming--it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

Nobody welcomes a war - not if they're smart. But war finds everyone sooner or later. It's inevitable.

I think all of us are agreed that war is probably man's greatest stupidity and I think peace is the dream that lives in the heart of everyone wherever he may be in the world, but unfortunately, unlike a family quarrel, it doesn't take two to make a war. It only takes one, unless the other one is prepared to surrender at the first hint of force.

A smart soldier wants to know the causes of wars. Also how to end them. After all, war is the normal state of affairs, isn't it? Peace is the name of the ideal we deduce from the fact that there have been interludes between wars.

War...seems a mere madness, a collective insanity.

From time immemorial, people have talked about peace without achieving it. Do we simply lack enough experience? Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. . . . War may be too much a part of history to be eliminated—ever.

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

You can’t have peace without a war.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

War...is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.

We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war.