“The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Whenever you’re faced with an explanation of what’s going on in Washington, the choice between incompetence and conspiracy, always choose incompetence.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Life and consciousness are the two great mysteries. Actually, their substrates are the inanimate. And how do you get from neurons shooting around in the brain to the thought that pops up in your head and mine? There’s something deeply mysterious about that. And if you’re not struck by the mystery, I think you haven’t thought about it.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Sometimes it’s easy to go where the wind blows, but those that stand firmly planted are forces to be reckoned with.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think – and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I don’t mind going into a liberal lion’s den. That’s where you test yourself.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“The one thing that’s always been the center of my political thinking – and it goes back to when I was 19 and editor of my college paper – is an abhorrence of the extreme.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“If you believe that health care is a public good to be guaranteed by the state, then a single-payer system is the next best alternative. Unfortunately, it is fiscally unsustainable without rationing.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Every civilization is founded on sins – every single one. Dispossession, violence, appropriation. What distinguishes civilizations are the ones who rise above it.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“The international community lies at the center of the Obama foreign policy. Unfortunately, it is a fiction. There is no such thing. Different countries have different histories, geographies, necessities, and interests. There’s no natural, inherent, or enduring international community.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, ‘How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?’ The answer is, ‘I was young once.’ End of answer.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Chess: It’s like alcohol. It’s a drug. I have to control it, or it could overwhelm me. I have a regular Monday night game at my home, and I do play a little online.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“The normalization of Trump is one indicator that there may be less to the populist insurrection than imagined.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Never leave a crossword unfinished.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of ‘cowards’ perpetuating ‘senseless acts of violence’ is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly vicious warriors and need to be treated as such.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“There is a mystique about psychiatry that people think that you have some kind of a magical lens, you know, Superman’s X-ray vision into the soul. One of the reasons I left psychiatry is that I didn’t believe that.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“The U.N. is worse than disaster. The U.N. creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful U.N. Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty and anti-Semitic, among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Every new president flatters himself that he, kinder and gentler, is beginning the world anew. Yet, when Barack Obama in his inaugural address reached out to Muslims by saying, ‘To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,’ his formulation was needlessly defensive and apologetic.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I’m a former Red Sox fan, now fully rehabilitated.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“In the liberal remake of ‘Casablanca,’ the police captain comes upon the scene of the shooting and orders his men to ’round up the usual weapons.’ It’s always the weapon and never the shooter.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Fight for what you know to be right. Don’t give up.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“If you get a call to go to a certain place in the middle of the night to pick up stolen goods, and it turns out the stolen goods don’t show up but the cops show up, I think you’re going to have a very weak story saying, ‘Well, I got swindled here.’”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Trump’s relentless public humiliation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions was clearly intended to get him to resign.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“When the Cleveland Cavaliers lost the 2015 NBA Finals to Golden State, LeBron James sat motionless in the locker room, staring straight ahead, still wearing his game jersey, for 45 minutes after the final buzzer. Here was a guy immensely wealthy, widely admired, at the peak of his powers – yet stricken, inconsolable.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“In the end, what brings civilizations down is when the elites lose confidence in the rightness of their cause.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I happen to believe that the preemption school is correct, that the risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire his weapons will only grow with time.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“If Obama has his way, the change that is coming is a new America: ‘fair,’ leveled and social democratic. Obama didn’t get elected to warranty your muffler. He’s here to warranty your life.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Newt Gingrich had to work hard – getting Republican candidates to sign the Contract with America – to nationalize the election that swept Republicans to victory in 1994. A Democratic anti-Tea Party campaign would do that for the Republicans – nationalize the election, gratis – in 2010.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“The conservative idea is not that government has no role. You might have argued that in the thirties when conservatives opposed the New Deal.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Ted Cruz is not the official spokesman for American conservatism. If you want somebody who has been out there, who has offered an alternative – the person who offered an alternative, for example, is… Paul Ryan.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I think if you’re going to master policy, especially world affairs, you’ve got to know history.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama’s view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“In the course of his presidency, Obama has gone from an almost magical charismatic figure to an ordinary politician. Ordinary. Average.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I think the editorial page of the Washington Post is the best in the country. I think the editorials – considering it’s a liberal town, liberal constituency and from the liberal tradition – I think it’s the best editorial page around. It’s quite balanced.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I believe in what I believe, and I think after all these years I’ve heard a lot of arguments, and I’m convinced by the superiority of the arguments that are made on the conservative side. I think that’s a better way to run a society.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Under our constitutional system, the executive executes the laws that Congress has passed. It should not be executing laws that Congress has rejected.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today’s politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Now this is a way to approach our healthcare problems: increase the number of tax collectors and decrease the number of doctors – brilliant!”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Obama and the Democrats were so critical of what Bush did, the interrogations, the secret prisons, Guantanamo and all of that, and even the war on terror. Obama won’t use the word. He’s made war on the war on terror.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“The Internet is a cauldron of anger every day, every year, election year or not, with unemployment at 10 percent or at two percent. It isn’t exactly a good index of what’s happening.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“So far as I’m concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it’s not easeful for me.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I would say I see myself as a psychiatrist in remission.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Ron Paul is not going to be president, so we don’t have to worry about who’s going to be in his cabinet.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Ted Cruz is a patriot. He believes in what he does. He’s done marvels in mobilizing conservatives, mobilizing Americans concerned about the direction of the ever-expanding entitlement state under Obama, and particularly the threat it is to freedom. I disagree with his tactics, but I agree entirely with his objectives.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I began my journalistic career on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in. That’s the day I showed up for work at ‘The New Republic’ magazine.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“The world is a Hobbesian state of nature in which the struggle for domination is the very essence of international life.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Clashes of values and the struggle for primacy constitute a constant in human history that accounts for that other constant – conflict and war.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn’t lend itself to histrionics. You ‘take in’ a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I don’t know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they’re capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn’t scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there’s no telling what might have ensued.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Nuclear doctrine consists of thinking the unthinkable. It involves making threats and promising retaliation that is cruel and destructive beyond imagining. But it has its purpose: to prevent war in the first place.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That’s its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“To his credit, Obama didn’t just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something – to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America’s deeply and historically individualist polity.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness… I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys, but not in America. I don’t want to see it hovering over anybody’s home.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation’s destiny.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life – full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“If you control one house of Congress, you cannot abolish something like Obamacare, no matter how much pressure you apply.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Longevity, for a columnist, is a simple proposition: Once you start, you don’t stop. You do it until you die or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“The way that Trump spoke about the outside world was the most aggressive, most hyper-nationalist, and in some ways most hostile of any inaugural address I think since the Second World War.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“There was once a philosopher who said, ‘I don’t believe in God, but I fear him greatly.’ That’s about where I am.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Every once in a while, the Senate seems to remember that it belongs to a coequal branch.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Trump is a systemic stress test.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“For every moment of triumph, there is an unequal and opposite feeling of despair. Take that iconic photograph of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over the prostrate, semiconscious wreckage of Sonny Liston. Great photo. Now think of Liston. Do the pleasure/pain calculus.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“As most who have engaged in competitive sports know, there’s nothing to match the amplitude of emotion brought by losing.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“I don’t think the West needs to apologize – or pay – for having invented the steam engine.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“Trump’s behavior is deeply disturbing but hardly surprising. His mercurial nature is not the product of a post-inaugural adder sting at Mar-a-Lago. It’s been there all along. And the American electorate chose him nonetheless.”
― Charles Krauthammer
“In retrospect, the populist panic may have been overblown. Regarding Brexit, for example, the shock exaggerated its meaning. Because it was so unexpected, it became a sensation.”
― Charles Krauthammer
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