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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

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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
Humans
Conception
Believe
Deserve
Appendix
Respect
Personhood
Moral
Embryo
Religious
Conferred
Upon
Embryos
Also
Equivalent
Human
Deserves

More quotes by Charles Krauthammer

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Post-Watergate morality, by which anything left private is taken as presumptive evidence of wrongdoing.
Charles Krauthammer
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The Brady Bill's only effect will be to desensitize the public to regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.
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The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help.
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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.
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I don't mind going into a liberal lion's den. That's where you test yourself.
Charles Krauthammer
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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.
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A three-year diet of rubber chicken and occasional crow.
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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.
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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.
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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
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The Houthi have local religious grievances, being Shiites in a majority Sunni land. But they are also agents of Shiite Iran, which arms, trains, and advises them. Their slogan - 'God is great. Death to America. Death to Israel' - could have been written in Persian.
Charles Krauthammer
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A one-hour work-week...would minimize the damage that Congress can do.
Charles Krauthammer
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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
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The medical malpractice system is totally out of control. Everybody in the system knows it. And it's not just of the outrageous judgments, it's not just the fact that some people get millions of dollars, others get nothing, and the one people who get rich are lawyered, it's just that it causes doctors to practice defensive medicine.
Charles Krauthammer
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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
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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.
Charles Krauthammer
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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
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Where there is a confluence of interests among nations, as, for example the swine flu or polio, you can get well functioning international institutions like the World Health Organization. And you can act. Climate change is different, because the science remains hypothetical and the potential costs staggering.
Charles Krauthammer
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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
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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