Charles Krauthammer

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good.

The conservative idea is not that government has no role. You might have argued that in the thirties when conservatives opposed the New Deal.

Nuclear doctrine consists of thinking the unthinkable. It involves making threats and promising retaliation that is cruel and destructive beyond imagining. But it has its purpose: to prevent war in the first place.

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.

You're betraying your whole life if you don't say what you think - and you don't say it honestly and bluntly.

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.

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'm a former Red Sox fan, now fully rehabilitated.

There is a mystique about psychiatry that people think that you have some kind of a magical lens, you know, Superman's X-ray vision into the soul. One of the reasons I left psychiatry is that I didn't believe that.

The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.

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.

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.