P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

We live in the United States. British settlers founded the first colony in North America. And English is our language.

It is a pity that instead of the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had not landed on the Pilgrim Fathers.

It is amazing to me that so little is still known about the Trail of Tears or the lives of the Cherokees themselves.

There is something inexpressibly sad in the thought of the children who crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and the fathers of Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Boston, and the infancy of those born in the first years of colonial life in this strange new world.

The early American arrived at a land of which he knew nothing.

Baseball may be our national pastime, but the age-old tradition of taking a swing at Congress is a sport with even deeper historical roots in the American experience. Since the founding of our country, citizens from Ben Franklin to David Letterman have made fun of their elected officials.

When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost unbearable.

As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.

Where others send invading armies, the Americans send their colonists … Texas will be lost to this republic if adequate measures are not taken.

The history of America is the history of families moving.

… the settlement and moral improvement of the colored population of Canada, for the purpose of purchasing crown or clergy reserve lands in the township of Raleigh and settling the same with colored families resident in Canada of approved moral character

Only in America can the first-generation Indian American Muslim kid get on the stage and make fun of the president.

My own forefathers arrived in America in 1620 on the Mayflower.

The first English settlers of North America knew they were making history. New Englanders in particular were so sure of it that they started writing their own accounts of themselves as soon as they got here.

I'm very interested in the early American history, the time when the country came together.

The Founders were right all along, but the results are a lot funnier than they intended.

I want you teabaggers out there to understand one thing: while you idolize the Founding Fathers and dress up like them, and smell like them, I think it's pretty clear that the Founding Fathers would have hated your guts. And what's more, you would've hated them. They were everything you despise. They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris and thought the Bible was mostly bulls**t.

All of our people all over the country-except the pure-blooded Indians-are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.

My forefathers didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.

Stop and think of what happened in America. The melting pot, yeah, it happened. Stop and think of what happened, from the first days of the founding. You have to go back to the Pilgrims. You have to include the Pilgrims in the founding. Why they came. What they learned on the way. What they learned after they got here. The Pilgrims, like everybody else, tried to establish a socialist collective. Bombed out. Didn't work. We know this, the governor wrote about it himself, William Bradford.

There's a very fine line between political comedian and activist, and I don't really think I fall over into the activist category.

I think it does because if you think of where "The Daily Show" was when I inherited it from Jon Stewart, I was in a space where, essentially, everything seemed like it was on track, you know, in terms of - from a progressive point of view, you know, you're looking at Republicans who, yes, were in control of many facets of government.

I'm not sure about that role any longer. The role used to be to mix things up and I think to a great extent it still is, but the quality of the work of the political cartoon has been succeeded by the wisecrack, the gag cartoon, so that the cartoonist becomes more of the equivalent of the Jay Leno monologues, or David Letterman monologues.

When I'm watching South Park I don't think it's written by neo-Nazis. They know exactly what they're doing.

Basically [Louise] Brandeis was a Jeffersonian. And you say the timing is great, and it is in a lot of senses, except not for [Tomas] Jefferson, because this is a Hamiltonian moment, and he's the rock star of the minute with a great musical.