Charles Krauthammer Quotes - Page 3

Under our constitutional system, the executive executes the laws that Congress has passed. It should not be executing laws that Congress has rejected.

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.

Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.

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.

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.

To his credit, Obama didn't just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something -- to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity.

Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.

The Brady Bill's only effect will be to desensitize the public to regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.

There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.

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.

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.

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.

History is not just cruel. It is witty.

I think if you're going to master policy, especially world affairs, you've got to know history.

I think the first thing is to recognize a mistake that Obama made. And others have made in thinking that you can revolutionize a system that's unbelievably complex and interlinked, one-sixth of the economy. That was a mistake because whenever you change one thing, it changes 80 other things, and now if you're changing everything at once, you have no idea what the outcome is going to be and you get all of these unintended side effects.

I don't know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they're capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn't scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there's no telling what might have ensued.

I would say I see myself as a psychiatrist in remission.

In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement - the number restriction (two and only two) - is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie, and rage.

I'm not against international institutions that would try to tackle global warming. But the way to go, at least in the short run, is to go to nuclear power. It's amazing to me that people who are so alarmed about global warming are so reluctant to adopt the obvious short-term solution - the bridge until the day when we have affordable renewable energy - of nuclear power.

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.

I began my journalistic career on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in. That's the day I showed up for work at 'The New Republic' magazine.

I distrust all multiculturalism, liberal or conservative. The Balkans amply demonstrate the perils of Balkanization.

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.

Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.