Top 189 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Krauthammer
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Charles Krauthammer.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
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.
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.
Every civilization is founded on sins - every single one. Dispossession, violence, appropriation. What distinguishes civilizations are the ones who rise above it.
I don't mind going into a liberal lion's den. That's where you test yourself.
As most who have engaged in competitive sports know, there's nothing to match the amplitude of emotion brought by losing.
You're betraying your whole life if you don't say what you think - and you don't say it honestly and bluntly.
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.
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.
I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation's destiny.
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.'
I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.
Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.
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.
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.
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.
The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.
The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster.
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.
I think if you're going to master policy, especially world affairs, you've got to know history.
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.
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.
In the course of his presidency, Obama has gone from an almost magical charismatic figure to an ordinary politician. Ordinary. Average.
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.
Sometimes it's easy to go where the wind blows, but those that stand firmly planted are forces to be reckoned with.
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.
I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.
Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.
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.
When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back.
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.
Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.
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.
The conservative idea is not that government has no role. You might have argued that in the thirties when conservatives opposed the New Deal.
Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The normalization of Trump is one indicator that there may be less to the populist insurrection than imagined.
Never leave a crossword unfinished.
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.
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.
Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.
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.
I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whenever you're faced with an explanation of what's going on in Washington, the choice between incompetence and conspiracy, always choose incompetence.
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.
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.
I'm a former Red Sox fan, now fully rehabilitated.
Ron Paul is not going to be president, so we don't have to worry about who's going to be in his cabinet.
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