Quote

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.

Charles Krauthammer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Krauthammer
Age: 68 †
Born: 1950
Born: March 13
Died: 2018
Died: June 21
Columnist
Journalist
Physician
Psychiatrist
Pundit
Writer
New York City
New York
Nothing
Permissible
Possible
Science
Everything

More quotes by Charles Krauthammer

Image
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
Image
If you subsidize apples, you get more apples if you subsidize unemployment, you get more of it.
Charles Krauthammer
Image
There are cycles in American politics. US cycles are even more pronounced because we Americans have a totally entrepreneurial presidential system. We don't have parliamentary opposition parties with a shadow prime minister and shadow cabinets. Every four years, the opposition reinvents itself.
Charles Krauthammer
Image
Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.
Charles Krauthammer
Image
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
Image
Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.
Charles Krauthammer
Image
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
Image
After endless days of commuting on the freeway to an antiseptic, sealed-window office, there is a great urge to backpack in the woods and build a fire.
Charles Krauthammer
Image
I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart.
Charles Krauthammer
Image
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
Image
The Iraquis can see it. The Kurds can feel it. The jihadists are counting on it.
Charles Krauthammer
Image
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
Image
With our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy.
Charles Krauthammer
Image
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
Image
The indecisiveness and ambivalence so devastatingly described by both of Obama's previous secretaries of defense, Leon Panetta and Bob Gates, are already beginning to characterize the Syria campaign.
Charles Krauthammer
Image
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
Image
Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy at best, extreme naivete.
Charles Krauthammer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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