Charles Krauthammer
Ted Cruz is not the official spokesman for American conservatism. If you want somebody who has been out there, who has offered an alternative - the person who offered an alternative, for example, is... Paul Ryan.
So far as I'm concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office.
The way that Trump spoke about the outside world was the most aggressive, most hyper-nationalist, and in some ways most hostile of any inaugural address I think since the Second World War.
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.
Clashes of values and the struggle for primacy constitute a constant in human history that accounts for that other constant - conflict and war.
Ron Paul is not going to be president, so we don't have to worry about who's going to be in his cabinet.
I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life - full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living.
I think the editorial page of the Washington Post is the best in the country. I think the editorials - considering it's a liberal town, liberal constituency and from the liberal tradition - I think it's the best editorial page around. It's quite balanced.
I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.
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.
Newt Gingrich had to work hard - getting Republican candidates to sign the Contract with America - to nationalize the election that swept Republicans to victory in 1994. A Democratic anti-Tea Party campaign would do that for the Republicans - nationalize the election, gratis - in 2010.
In the liberal remake of 'Casablanca,' the police captain comes upon the scene of the shooting and orders his men to 'round up the usual weapons.' It's always the weapon and never the shooter.
Obama and the Democrats were so critical of what Bush did, the interrogations, the secret prisons, Guantanamo and all of that, and even the war on terror. Obama won't use the word. He's made war on the war on terror.
Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.
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.
I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.
I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.
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.
If you control one house of Congress, you cannot abolish something like Obamacare, no matter how much pressure you apply.
Longevity, for a columnist, is a simple proposition: Once you start, you don't stop. You do it until you die or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax.
Fight for what you know to be right. Don't give up.
If you get a call to go to a certain place in the middle of the night to pick up stolen goods, and it turns out the stolen goods don't show up but the cops show up, I think you're going to have a very weak story saying, 'Well, I got swindled here.'
There was once a philosopher who said, 'I don't believe in God, but I fear him greatly.' That's about where I am.
In the end, what brings civilizations down is when the elites lose confidence in the rightness of their cause.
Trump's relentless public humiliation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions was clearly intended to get him to resign.
Every once in a while, the Senate seems to remember that it belongs to a coequal branch.
Trump is a systemic stress test.
Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out.
As most who have engaged in competitive sports know, there's nothing to match the amplitude of emotion brought by losing.
I don't think the West needs to apologize - or pay - for having invented the steam engine.
Trump's behavior is deeply disturbing but hardly surprising. His mercurial nature is not the product of a post-inaugural adder sting at Mar-a-Lago. It's been there all along. And the American electorate chose him nonetheless.
In retrospect, the populist panic may have been overblown. Regarding Brexit, for example, the shock exaggerated its meaning. Because it was so unexpected, it became a sensation.
The normalization of Trump is one indicator that there may be less to the populist insurrection than imagined.
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.Collection: Attitude
To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.Collection: Stupid
There's a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality.Collection: New York
In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.Collection: Giving
Washington is the only place in the world where a gaffe is when a politician accidently speaks the truth.Collection: World
Better to be paralyzed from the neck down than the neck upCollection: Necks
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?Collection: Exactly Is
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Media
Loyalty to the President is great, but loyalty to truth, integrity, and country is even better.Collection: Loyalty
If you subsidize apples, you get more apples; if you subsidize unemployment, you get more of it.Collection: Apples
If fences don't work, why is there one around the White House.Collection: White
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?Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Korea
I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart.Collection: Letting Go
Increasing public safety almost always means restricting liberties.Collection: Mean