Charles Krauthammer Quotes

If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice.

I don't believe that we should limit waterboarding - or, quite frankly, any other alternative torture technique - if it means saving Americans' lives.

The issue is not whether there are serious moral and practical costs to employing torture—of course there are for torture is evil. That is precisely why the choice of whether employ it to avert a greater evil is a tragic one.

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information - the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong.

An ethical action, like an unethical action, is usually analyzed by politicians purely in pragmatic terms.

We can’t legalize torture; it’s contrary to American values…. We’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.

We should be very chary of sacrificing large numbers of people for the sake of a contingent end, however advantageous that may appear… We never know enough to make the chance worth taking.

President Obama was right to ban torture, but the public must understand that this decision carries a potential cost in lost information. That's what makes it a moral choice.

I don't believe that torture works.

At some point in this death-penalty debate, the sanctity of innocent life demands that men and women of conservative conscience have to say: Enough.

We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment.

Requiring that an execution be relatively painless...actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.

Waterboarding isn't torture. We do waterboarding to our own soldiers in the military.

We can't make a decision based on PR value. We have to do what we think is right.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

When we go to war, our politicians will be guided by our popular will. And if we believe that torture 'got' bin Laden, then we will be more prone to accept the view that a good 'end' can justify brutal 'means.'

I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice.

Experience shows that the reliance on illegal, immoral, and inhumane interrogation techniques is universally a very poor choice.

Even if trolley problems were a realistic concern for AVs, it is not clear what, if anything, regulators or companies developing AVs should do about them. The trolley problem is an intensely debated thought experiment precisely because there isn't a consensus on what should be done.

Human suffering is not, nor should it ever be, a political issue.

No one truly understood what it is to exist as someone who has to do the things that Jack Bauer does.

The death penalty confronts us with a penetrating moral question: Can even the monstrous crimes of those who are condemned to death and are truly guilty of such crimes erase their sacred dignity as human beings and their intrinsic right to life?

I think enhanced interrogation saved lives.

The taking of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict on another, even when backed by legal process. Where the death penalty persists, conditions for those awaiting execution are often horrifying, leading to aggravated suffering.