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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.

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
Paper
Policy
American
Power
Great
Believe
Divide
Thinking
Divides
Foreign

More quotes by Charles Krauthammer

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Obsession with self is the motif of our time.
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Don't touch my junk, you airport security goon - my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I'm a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?
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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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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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I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.
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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.
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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.
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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Obama has committed the U.S. to war on the Islamic State. To then allow within a month an allied enclave to be overrun - and perhaps annihilated - would be a major blow.
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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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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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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.
Charles Krauthammer
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As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy - a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.
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