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.

Charles Krauthammer

Categorized in : Art Genius Risk

The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences from social ostracism to vocational defenestration upon those who refuse to be silenced.

Charles Krauthammer

winning attitude trying

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Charles Krauthammer

stupid law thinking

Better to be paralyzed from the neck down than the neck up

Charles Krauthammer

paralyzed necks

Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical - and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.

Charles Krauthammer

npr media sea

Washington is the only place in the world where a gaffe is when a politician accidently speaks the truth.

Charles Krauthammer

politics speak world

Consider the oddity of those drug commercials on television. Fifteen seconds of the purported therapeutic effort, followed by about 45 seconds of a rapidly muttered list of horrific possible side effects. When the ad is over, I can't remember a thing about what the pill is supposed to do, except perhaps cause nausea, liver damage, projectile vomiting, a nasty rash, a four-hour erection, and sudden death. Sudden death is my favorite because there is something comical about it being a side effect. What exactly is the main effect in that case? Relief from abdominal bloating?

Charles Krauthammer

exactly-is oddities effort

If you subsidize apples, you get more apples; if you subsidize unemployment, you get more of it.

Charles Krauthammer

unemployment apples ifs

Loyalty to the President is great, but loyalty to truth, integrity, and country is even better.

Charles Krauthammer

loyalty integrity country

Some will protest that in a world with so much human suffering, it is something between eccentric and obscene to mourn a dog. I think not. After all, it is perfectly normal—indeed, deeply human—to be moved when nature presents us with a vision of great beauty. Should we not be moved when it produces a vision—a creature—of the purest sweetness?

Charles Krauthammer

perfectly-normal dog thinking

There's a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality.

Charles Krauthammer

liberty new-york reason-why

If fences don't work, why is there one around the White House.

Charles Krauthammer

fence white house

In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.

Charles Krauthammer

credit stupidity giving

I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart.

Charles Krauthammer

letting-go heart thinking

Life and consciousness are the two great mysteries. Actually, their substrates are the inanimate. And how do you get from neurons shooting around in the brain to the thought that pops up in your head and mine? There's something deeply mysterious about that. And if you're not struck by the mystery, I think you haven't thought about it.

Charles Krauthammer

brain two thinking

Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic - purely symbolic - move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.

Charles Krauthammer

gun real moving

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

incompetence conspiracy choices

When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back.

Charles Krauthammer

allies permission country

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.

Charles Krauthammer

cuba korea lasts

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

running believe thinking

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.

Charles Krauthammer

trust witty country