P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

The reason there IS a Turkey and there ISN'T a Kurdistan is in all of history no Kurd could ever stand by any other Kurd long enough to hold off all the hungry Arabs, Persians, Turks, Brits and other sand carnivores swimming around the Fertile Crescent.

Afghanistan's borders are arbitrary, drawn to meet 19th-century political needs rather than to respect ethnic or religious patterns.

Historically, the Middle East was governed by Empires. The empires drew the lines between nations without paying attention to the ethnicity of the peoples in the nations. Now, you don’t have a single country that is cohesive in the Middle East. For that reason, you see civil wars all over the place.

Far more serious and lasting than any of the …[other] grievances are the feelings which Germans entertain and will continue to entertain as to the justice of their present frontiers. They may have to submit indefinitely, time may heal their wounds, but it will be a long time.… It would be folly to expect acquiescence of the heart at least in any near future.

Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region, rioted over much needed spelling reform in the Soviet Union.

The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

I am not worried that the Egyptians will suddenly invade Ethiopia. Nobody who has tried that has lived to tell the story.

The more borders we have, the more quarrels, the more wars. That's one way to think about borders - they're trouble.

In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.

In particular, the efforts to reestablish peace after the World War have been directed toward the formation of states and the regulation of their frontiers according to a consciously national program.

Only recently, during the nineteenth century, and then only in Europe, do we meet forms of the state which have been created by a deliberate national feeling.

Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin.

As recently as the 1970s, some Pashtun leaders in Afghanistan were pushing to create a new state, Pashtunistan, by joining with Pashtuns in Pakistan.

Creating a nation requires the will of the people!

In the Middle East, a nation whose youngsters are not willing to kill and get killed for it is a nation on borrowed time. It will not last long.

It is a hard and difficult thing to do to create a nation

… half-formed pseudo nations

Bad neighbors will keep cartographers busy well into the next century.

History has shown that the life, borders and forms of states are changeable as created not only on the territorial and ethnic, but also economic, political, military and other suchlike grounds

A U.S. invasion of Iraq could turn the whole region into a cauldron, and thus destroy the war on terrorism. A military campaign very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

Borders cannot be redrawn in blood.

Any time you see a straight line on a map of the Middle East, Winston Churchill probably drew it.

… empires cannot be shattered and new states raised upon their ruins without disturbance. To create new boundaries is always to create new troubles. The one follows the other.