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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Charles Krauthammer Quotes

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

The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster.

– 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

In the course of his presidency, Obama has gone from an almost magical charismatic figure to an ordinary politician. Ordinary. Average.

– 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

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

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

– Charles Krauthammer

I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it’s not easeful for me.

– 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think if you’re going to master policy, especially world affairs, you’ve got to know history.

– 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

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 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

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

– 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

The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.

– 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

I don’t mind going into a liberal lion’s den. That’s where you test yourself.

– 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

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

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