Daily Inspiration Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

A good O'Rourke line works like a slapstick gag delivered in a tux: you laugh, then notice it left a bruise. "Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly" flips the standard parental lecture into a child's-eye complaint, but the real target isn't kids or parents so much as the fantasy that authority is inherently rational. The joke hinges on a deadpan misapplication of bureaucratic language - "discipline properly" sounds like an instructional pamphlet, a school policy memo, something written by adults who believe misbehavior can be managed like paperwork. Then he drops in the physical fact of "size", puncturing all that procedural seriousness with something embarrassingly primitive: power is often just mass.

The subtext is cynical and affectionate at once. Parenting, in O'Rourke's world, is less a noble moral project than an uneven negotiation where the stronger party pretends it's about principles. The line also needles the way adult society talks about children: we demand compliance from smaller people and call it character-building; if the roles were reversed, we'd recognize it as coercion. That reversal is the whole mechanism - not to argue that kids should "discipline" parents, but to expose how much "discipline" depends on leverage, not virtue.

Context matters: O'Rourke came up as a satirist-journalist suspicious of grand reform schemes and the sanctimony of experts. By shrinking the family into a miniature power politics, he suggests that our biggest institutions - schools, governments, workplaces - run on the same mix of lofty rhetoric and blunt force.