Charles Krauthammer Quotes

Inside many liberals is a totalitarian screaming to get out. They don't like to have another point of view in the room that they don't squash and the way they try to squash it is by character assassination and name calling.

The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion It is an atheist, nihilistic religion - but it is a religion that is obligatory for all.

The core problem in our society is political correctness.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

On the face of it, China has won the Olympics. But it is not China that has won, but the Communist party. The Chinese people have lost.

The critical importance of honest journalism and a free flowing, respectful national conversation needs to be had in our country. But it is being buried as collateral damage in a war whose battles include political correctness and ideological orthodoxy.

When a government takes over a people's economic life, it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute, it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs.

The journalistic traits that are valued on TV and radio talk shows are destructive to democracy.

...the worst horror of the Russian Revolution was the letting loose of one hundred million orators, for their passion for talk was immediately responsible for all the other horrors ...Oratory prevented Russia from becoming a constitutional country

There is a no-man's land in our politics: on the one hand, bounded by what we know to be true, and on the other hand, bounded by what the media says is politically correct. And that's where Donald Trump lives. And it's our failure to admit what we all know to be true in the guise of political correctness that fuels the Trump candidacy.

Infected by political ideology, if you dare question climate models, your career is done.

The silence caused by politicizing speech is deafening.

We vainly fancy ourselves above the ugly informing and paranoia of the right-wing McCarthy era, but in the 21st century, the Left has fashioned a mirror image.

In Romania, during the communist regime, we were very culturally suppressed. At 18 years old, I wasn't allowed to wear bell-bottom jeans and eyeliner. I couldn't understand why!

They want me to stop making my opinions and not saying a word; I know the Left wants that.

The Soviet Union had only one party. You couldn't express yourself freely; you couldn't admit belief in God. And yet this terrible regime understood that human beings have to express themselves, through music, even at a bad level. All kids studied music automatically, just as they did maths or languages or sport.

When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.

The sad fact is that actual artistic oppression - book banning in its many modern forms - is a matter of course in the entertainment industry, especially when the underlying product is declared politically incorrect or runs contrary to the interests of Hollywood's political altar, the Democratic Party.

The danger of censorship in cultural media increases in proportion to the degree to which one approaches the winning of a mass audience.

I don't know how you change that. There's hardly anybody left like me in the Democratic Party in Congress. These districts have been so gerrymandered that, in most of them, a Democrat can't win. Somebody like me trying to start off today, he'd never get endorsed. Because I'm too conservative.

One of the scandalous things I did was as I read them afterward I would burn them. I loved them, but for practical reasons I had to lighten the load. I burned favorites, like William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying." There's a whole list in the back of my book. It's me,[Adolf] Hitler, [Benito] Mussolini, and Pol Pot. We're the book burners.

Orwell says straight, look, in England what comes out in a free country is not very different from this totalitarian monster that I'm describing in the book. It's more or less the same. How come in a free country? He has two sentences, which are pretty accurate. One, he says, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. And second - and I think this is much more important - a good education instills in you the intuitive understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say.

I think the attitude needs to be: We need to defeat Liberals, defeat them, defeat them. Not accommodate them. Not try to persuade them. If they come along of their own volition, fine. We accept them. But they are the epitome of bigotry and prejudice.

The media has created this environment that is okay to say almost anything about somebody who is, you know, right of Jane Fonda. You know, if you are slightly conservative or even libertarian points of view, especially if you are persuasive and charismatic and funny and effective, you will get called the most appalling things.