Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer’s sentence starts as a moral absolute and then immediately drills a trapdoor beneath it. “Torture is an impermissible evil” signals deontological clarity: some acts are off-limits because they corrode the actor, not just the victim. Then comes the pivot: “Except.” The structure is the argument. By conceding “evil,” he keeps his hands rhetorically clean while still authorizing the practice in the one scenario designed to short-circuit moral hesitation.

The “ticking time bomb” is doing more than supplying an example; it’s a narrative machine. It compresses uncertainty into urgency, replaces messy intelligence work with Hollywood inevitability, and turns a political decision into a private thought experiment: you, the reader, alone with a timer and a captive. Calling the threatened person “an innocent” pre-selects sympathy, while “the bad guy” pre-selects guilt. “Possesses information” smuggles in near-omniscience (we somehow know he knows), and “refuses to divulge” frames torture as a last-resort response to obstinacy rather than a strategic choice by the state.

“In such a case, the choice is easy” is the giveaway: the intent isn’t to weigh tradeoffs, but to delegitimize doubt. If the choice is “easy,” anyone resisting is either naive, squeamish, or complicit in harm.

The context matters. Krauthammer wrote and argued in the post-9/11 climate when America was searching for permission structures for exceptional measures. His formulation offers a tidy moral exemption that can be endlessly expanded: once torture becomes thinkable in the “rare” case, the fight shifts to who gets to declare the clock is ticking.