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In the Middle Ages people took potions for their ailments. In the 19th century they took snake oil. Citizens of today's shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead.

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
Age
Ages
Antioxidants
Today
Oil
Cactus
Take
Citizens
Ailments
People
Took
Extract
Instead
Shiny
Century
Snake
Modern
Snakes
Middle
Technological
Potions

More quotes by Charles Krauthammer

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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.
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Middleness is the very enemy of the bold.
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Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637.
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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.
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Pass legislation. When Obama signs, you've shown seriousness and the ability to govern. When he vetoes, you've clarified the differences between party philosophies and prepared the ground for 2016.
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It’s not the advertising - it’s the dog food. Every time anybody has a look at it or has a lick of it, they don’t like it.
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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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Obama's Democrats have become the part of no. Real cuts to federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell no.
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Identity politics is the mother's milk of the Democratic Left.
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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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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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American public opinion, as you can see in the polls, radically changed from being against airstrikes to being heavily in favor that [President Obama] decided to do airstrikes. This is a classic example of leading from behind where he waits for public opinion. And now it's the public who's demanding he do something.
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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.
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Better to be paralyzed from the neck down than the neck up
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Third parties in America gravitate not only to the extremes, but to irrelevance. (John Anderson's upcoming presidential campaign will undoubtedly confirm both tendencies.)
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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.
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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.
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Obsession with self is the motif of our time.
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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
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Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.
Charles Krauthammer