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Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.

Charles Krauthammer

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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
Ideas
Legislative
Matter
Dazzling
Work
Speeches
Always
Proposal
Wears
Campaigns
Speech
Proposals
Magic
Slick

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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.
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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.
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Obsession with self is the motif of our time.
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The great divide in American foreign policy thinking is between those who believe in paper and those who believe in power.
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I don't mind going into a liberal lion's den. That's where you test yourself.
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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.
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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.
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I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.
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For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty - statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction.
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Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.
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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.
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