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My Favorite Quotes of Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer (March 13, 1950 – June 21, 2018) was an American political columnist. A moderate liberal who turned independent conservative as a political pundit, Krauthammer won the Pulitzer Prize for his columns in The Washington Post in 1987. His weekly column was syndicated to more than 400 publications worldwide. While in his first year studying medicine at Harvard Medical School, Krauthammer became permanently paralyzed from the waist down after a diving board accident that severed his spinal cord at cervical spinal nerve 5. After spending 14 months recovering in a hospital, he returned to medical school, graduating to become a psychiatrist involved in the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III in 1980. In August 2017, due to his battle with cancer, Krauthammer stopped writing his column and serving as a Fox News contributor. He died on June 21, 2018.

Some of my favorite quotes of his are:

“After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.”
 - 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

“Better to be paralyzed from the neck down than the neck up.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“Consider the oddity of those drug commercials on television. Fifteen seconds of the purported therapeutic effort, followed by about 45 seconds of a rapidly muttered list of horrific possible side effects. When the ad is over, I can't remember a thing about what the pill is supposed to do, except perhaps cause nausea, liver damage, projectile vomiting, a nasty rash, a four-hour erection, and sudden death. Sudden death is my favorite because there is something comical about it being a side effect. What exactly is the main effect in that case? Relief from abdominal bloating?”
 - 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

“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

“Fox News is no monopoly.  It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media.  ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox.  The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical - and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal:  Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“Great leaders are willing to retire unloved and unpopular as the price for great exertion.”
 - 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

“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

“I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“I don't mind going into a liberal lion's den. That's where you test yourself.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“I think if you're going to master policy, especially world affairs, you've got to know history.”
 - 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

“If fences don't work, why is there one around the White House.”
 - 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

“If you subsidize apples, you get more apples; if you subsidize unemployment, you get more of it.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.”
 - 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

“Increasing public safety almost always means restricting liberties.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“It is more than slightly ironic that Democrats, the fiercely pro-choice party, reserve free choice for aborting a fetus, while denying it for such matters as choosing your child's school or joining a union.”
 - 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

“Loyalty to the President is great, but loyalty to truth, integrity, and country is even better.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic - purely symbolic - move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“Some will protest that in a world with so much human suffering, it is something between eccentric and obscene to mourn a dog. I think not. After all, it is perfectly normal—indeed, deeply human—to be moved when nature presents us with a vision of great beauty. Should we not be moved when it produces a vision—a creature—of the purest sweetness?”
 - 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

“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

“The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences from social ostracism to vocational defenestration upon those who refuse to be silenced.”
 - 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

“The world is a Hobbesian state of nature in which the struggle for domination is the very essence of international life.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“There's a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
 - 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

“Washington is the only place in the world where a gaffe is when a politician accidentally speaks the truth.”
 - Charles Krauthammer

“When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back.”
 - 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