Charles Krauthammer is a brilliant writer and wordsmith who has had enormous success in more than one career. He was a Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford, then went to Harvard Medical School, where he became a board certified psychiatrist and later went on to be the Chief Resident of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He even is credited with "discovering" a form of mania that is common in people who have Bipolar Disorder, before he gradually turned his attention to politics.Krauthammer was in charge of psychiatric research in the Carter administration and later became a speechwriter for Vice President Mondale during his campaign for the Presidency in 1980. He later became a contributing editor to The New Republic and the Weekly Standard, and he writes a weekly column for the Washington Post that is read in over 200 newspapers across the country. In 2006, the Financial Times described him as the "most influential commentator in America."
Charles Krauthammer is also physically disabled. He became paralyzed in a diving accident during Medical School in 1972. In spite of his disability, he has brought his words and ideas into the thoughts and consciousness of many people today. Below are some of his most famous quotes.
"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."
"Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare."
"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."
"Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs. We will get the very rich, who contract out the messy things in life the very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show and the very devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their discovery."
"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."
"Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission."
"Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible."
"This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of 'cowards' perpetuating 'senseless acts of violence' is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly vicious warriors and need to be treated as such."
"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."
"When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back."
“When in 1966 Charles de Gaulle ordered France out of NATO and American troops off French soil, Secretary of State Dean Rusk asked him if that included the American soldiers lying dead in the cemeteries at Normandy and throughout France”
“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.”
“This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of 'cowards' perpetuating 'senseless acts of violence' is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly vicious warriors and need to be treated as such.”
“When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back”
“Post-Watergate morality, by which anything left private is taken as presumptive evidence of wrongdoing.”
“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.”
“In the old days one merely gawked at these unfortunates. Donahue's genius is to get them to talk.”
“A three-year diet of rubber chicken and occasional crow.”
