Long-time Fox News panelist Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist,
Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author, who died Thursday at age
68, regularly commented on issues great and small.
Following is a selection of his wisdom from exclusive, in-depth interviews he has done with Fox News:
GETTING IT RIGHT
“I decided to become a writer so I could write about
politics, because I thought that’s the most important thing one can
involve oneself in. In the end, all the beautiful, elegant things in
life, the things that I care about, the things that matter, depend on
getting the politics right. Because in those societies where they get it
wrong, everything else is destroyed, everything else is leveled.”
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
“America is the only country ever founded on an
idea. The only country that is not founded on race or even common
history. It's founded on an idea and the idea is liberty. That is
probably the rarest phenomena in the political history of the world;
this has never happened before. And not only has it happened, but it's
worked. We are the most flourishing, the most powerful, most influential
country on Earth with this system, invented by the greatest political
geniuses probably in human history.”
GO WHERE THE EVIDENCE TAKES YOU.
“I was a Great Society liberal. I thought we ought to
help the poor, we ought to give them all the money we can. And then,
the evidence started to pour in. The evidence of how these grand
programs, the poverty programs, the welfare programs--everything was
making things worse.
I didn't have a dog in that fight. I was willing to go
where the evidence led. As a doctor, I'd been trained in empirical
evidence. If the treatment is killing your patients, you stop the
treatment.”
THE RIGHT WORDS MATTER
“[Playwright] Tom Stoppard once said the reason he
writes is because every once in a while you put a few words together in
the right order and you're able to give the world a nudge. And sometimes
I'm able to do that.”
HOW TO PERSUADE OTHERS
“You don't want to talk in high-falutin’, ridiculous
abstractions that nobody understands. Just try to make things plain and
clear.
The one thing I try to do when I want to persuade
someone is never start with my assumptions, because if I do, we're not
going to get anywhere. You have to figure out what the other person
believes, and then try to draw a line from what they believe into what
you believe in by showing them a logical sequence. But you’ve got to
lead them along and you have to have it clear in your head from the
beginning or you'll never get there.”
HOW HE MELLOWED
“I've calmed down a bit from where I thought: this is
it, it’s the end, we're done. I’ve sort of accepted the fact that
there's an organic evolution to society, and as long as we keep civil
society strong and in constraint to some extent, we're going to do
okay. So I guess you could say I've become a mellow conservative.”
THE IMPORTANCE OF STRUCTURE
“When you write anything--a column, an essay--if you
have the structure right, everything is easy. You get the structure
wrong, you'll never get it right. You’ll spend hours whacking your way
through the weeds with a machete and you won't be able to escape the
marsh.”
INDIVIDUALS MAKE A DIFFERENCE
“In our sophisticated historical analyses, we tend to
attribute everything to these large underlying currents, to certain
political ideologies, or social changes like industrialization or the
growth of women's rights and all that. But that’s missing the
obvious—there’s usually a person who influenced things in a way that all
the underlying forces cannot account for.
In American history, (there’s) Washington, Lincoln,
FDR, Reagan--they all stand out. It’s a way of looking at history
that's less abstract, and is more recognizing the individual, which we
tend not to do.”
FAITH
“Faith is something that one has or doesn't have; one
doesn't construct it. The one thing I do believe is that of all the
possible views of God, atheism is the least plausible. The idea that
there's no meaning or purpose or origin--that the Universe is as it
always was, is to me entirely implausible for reasons of physics, apart
from faith. Because if you reason back to first causes, and if you’re an
atheist, you get to a logical contradiction.”
BEAUTY DOESN’T NEED A PURPOSE
“In major league baseball you can see the highest level of play—it’s irresistible. I love the game
And there's such a beauty in the intricacy of
chess--you use words that to a non-player seem nonsensical—elegance,
romance—people don’t see it when you push a piece of wood across a
board.
Anything done at a high level of excellence always
intrigues me because it's the ultimate expression of being human, that
you do something, something you don't have to do.
What's the point of playing chess? There is no point.
There doesn't have to be a point. It's just the beauty of the exercise
and the difficulty of it that make it worthwhile, admirable and very
pleasurable.”
HIS LUCK
“[Writing commentary] is more than passion. It's
purpose. I'm very lucky to have ended up where I am by pure blind
luck--how I stumbled upon what I was meant to do. It turns out I have
some aptitude for it and I love it and I think it's important. That's a
great rarity in life. And I appreciate every day I wake up that I can
do that and it turned out that way.”
HIS PARALYSIS
“All it means is whatever I do is a little bit harder
and probably a little bit slower. And that's basically it. Everybody has
their cross to bear-- everybody.
I made a promise to myself on day one [after my injury]. I was not going to allow it to alter my life.
It's very easy to be characterized by the externalities
in your life. I dislike people focusing on it. I made a vow when I was
injured that it would never be what would characterize my life. I don't
want it to be the first line of my obituary. If it is, that will be a
failure.”
