Charles Krauthammer Quotes

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

Medicine--and particularly hospital medicine, which lives in a sea of human suffering--has a way of beating callowness out of even the most self-possessed youth. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The more settled and ordered one's life - and in particular one's communal life - the easier it becomes for one's imagination to fail. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Obama is learning very late that, for a superpower, inaction is a form of action. You can abdicate, but you really can't hide. History will find you. It has now found Obama. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Ted Cruz is a patriot. He believes in what he does. He's done marvels in mobilizing conservatives, mobilizing Americans concerned about the direction of the ever-expanding entitlement state under Obama, and particularly the threat it is to freedom. I disagree with his tactics, but I agree entirely with his objectives. ~ Charles Krauthammer

If you subsidize apples, you get more apples; if you subsidize unemployment, you get more of it. ~ Charles Krauthammer

For the Europeans there really is a peace dividend, because we provide the peace. They can afford social democracy without the capacity to defend themselves because they can always depend on the United States.
So why not us as well? Because what for Europe is decadence--decline, in both comfort and relative safety--is for us mere denial. Europe can eat, drink and be merry for America protects her. But for America it's different. If we choose the life of ease, who stands guard for us? ~ Charles Krauthammer

Some will protest that in a world with so much human suffering, it is something between eccentric and obscene to mourn a dog. I think not. After all, it is perfectly normal - indeed, deeply human - to be moved when nature presents us with a vision of great beauty. Should we not be moved when it produces a vision - a creature - of the purest sweetness? ~ Charles Krauthammer

We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie, and rage. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Terror attacks are now 'man-caused disasters.' And the 'global war on terror' is no more. It is an 'overseas contingency operation.'
Nidal Hassan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. but the massacre remains officially classified as an act not of terrorism but of 'workplace violence. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Don't touch my junk, you airport security goon
my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I'm a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come? ~ Charles Krauthammer

Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission. ~ Charles Krauthammer

And who is the hero of that story? Who slew the dragon [totalitarianism]? Yes, it was the ordinary man, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. Yes, it was America and its allies. Yes, it was the great leaders: FDR, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Thatcher, Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill. ~ Charles Krauthammer

This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of 'cowards' perpetuating 'senseless acts of violence' is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly vicious warriors and need to be treated as such. ~ Charles Krauthammer

In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The most basic parental bond is maternal. Equal parenting is great--it has forced men to get off their duffs--but women, from breast to cradle to cuddle, can nurture in ways that men cannot. ~ Charles Krauthammer

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza. ~ Charles Krauthammer

If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs. We will get the very rich, who contract out the messy things in life the very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show and the very devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their discovery. ~ Charles Krauthammer

In the liberal remake of 'Casablanca,' the police captain comes upon the scene of the shooting and orders his men to 'round up the usual weapons.' It's always the weapon and never the shooter. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Religion--invaluable in America's founding, forming and flowering--deserves a place in the schools. Indeed, it had that place for almost 200 years. A healthy country would teach its children evolution--and the Ten Commandments. ~ Charles Krauthammer

In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement - the number restriction (two and only two) - is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice. ~ Charles Krauthammer

We've had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepherd rode Freedom 7 in 1961. If we had put off space exploration until these earthbound social and economic conundrums were solved, our rocketry would be about where North Korea's is today. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Obama and the Democrats were so critical of what Bush did, the interrogations, the secret prisons, Guantanamo and all of that, and even the war on terror. Obama won't use the word. He's made war on the war on terror. ~ Charles Krauthammer

If you believe that health care is a public good to be guaranteed by the state, then a single-payer system is the next best alternative. Unfortunately, it is fiscally unsustainable without rationing. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete. ~ Charles Krauthammer

A Lake Charles-based artist, Sally was a progressive Democrat who in 2016 primary favored Bernie Sanders. Sally's very dear friend and worl-traveling flight attendant from Opelousas, Louisiana, Shirley was an enthusiast for the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Both woman had joined sororities at LSU. Each had married, had three children, lived in homes walking distance apart in Lake Charles, and had keys to each other's houses. Each loved the other's children. Shirley knew Sally's parents and even consulted Sally's mother when the two go to "fussing to much." They exchanged birthday and Christmas gifts and jointly scoured the newspaper for notices of upcoming cultural events they had, when they were neighbors in Lake Charles, attended together. One day when I was staying as Shirley's overnight guest in Opelousas, I noticed a watercolor picture hanging on the guestroom wall, which Sally had painted as a gift for Shirley's eleven-year-old daughter, who aspired to become a ballerina. With one pointed toe on a pudgy, pastel cloud, the other lifted high, the ballerina's head was encircled by yellow star-like butterflies. It was a loving picture of a child's dream--one that came true. Both women followed the news on TV--Sally through MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and Shirley via Fox News's Charles Krauthammer, and each talked these different reports over with a like-minded husband. The two women talk by phone two or three times a week, and their grown children keep in touch, partly across the ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

The Brady Bill's only effect will be to desensitize the public to regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness ... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I happen to believe that the preemption school is correct, that the risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire his weapons will only grow with time. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I began my journalistic career on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in. That's the day I showed up for work at 'The New Republic' magazine. ~ Charles Krauthammer

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. ~ Charles Krauthammer

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

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Why should we care about the coup? First, because we depend on Yemen's government to support our drone war against another local menace, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). It's not clear if we can even maintain our embassy in Yemen, let alone conduct operations against AQAP. And second, because growing Iranian hegemony is a mortal threat to our allies and interests in the entire Middle East. ~ Charles Krauthammer

refuses to consider ~ Charles Krauthammer

Chess enjoys a not wholly undeserved reputation for psychic derangement. It is an endeavor associated, when not with frank madness, with oddness and isolation. I remember a psychiatrist friend visiting me at a chess club in downtown Boston once. He walked in, sat down, looked around and said, 'Jeez, I could run a group here. ~ Charles Krauthammer

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and the source of its energy and freedom. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. ~ Charles Krauthammer

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. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical - and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I don't mind going into a liberal lion's den. That's where you test yourself. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The great divide in American foreign policy thinking is between those who believe in paper and those who believe in power. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I turned on Fox News and jumped when I saw that they had one of those things in their studio. "Are you people crazy?" I screamed at the television. "Get out of there. Somebody shoot it!" Then I realized I was watching Special Report and had mistaken Charles Krauthammer for a zombie. ~ Ian McClellan

If fences don't work, why is there one around the White House? ~ Charles Krauthammer

The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences from social ostracism to vocational defenestration upon those who refuse to be silenced. ~ Charles Krauthammer

In the middle ages, people took potions for their ailments. In the 19th century they took snake oil. Citizens of today's shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The uncritically admiring supporters and friends of the prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu], in whose ranks I certainly don't include David [Brooks], but include Charles Krauthammer, the columnist, and Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, insist on comparing him to the incomparable leader of the British forces in country in part of - during World War II. ~ Mark Shields

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's Dhina, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty than ever in human history. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The most powerful case in favor of capital punishment is the claim of justice: Some crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate punishment, the only fitting retribution, is death. This is not a claim to be taken lightly. One purpose of the law is that it ensure that evil be appropriately repaid, that justice be done. ~ Charles Krauthammer

A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys, but not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637. ~ Charles Krauthammer

So far as I'm concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Great leaders are willing to retire unloved and unpopular as the price for great exertion. ~ Charles Krauthammer

It is part of the trivialization of politics that we give endless attention to the inner life of the politician - his private thoughts, his inner demons - at the expense of his outer life. ~ Charles Krauthammer

After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of the more expensive American universities. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Third parties in America gravitate not only to the extremes, but to irrelevance. (John Anderson's upcoming presidential campaign will undoubtedly confirm both tendencies.) ~ Charles Krauthammer

In modern times we suffer not for our sins - sin having been abolished - but for ideology. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Take away Churchill in 1940...Nazism would have prevailed. Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known. ~ Charles Krauthammer

If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I'm not against international institutions that would try to tackle global warming. But the way to go, at least in the short run, is to go to nuclear power. It's amazing to me that people who are so alarmed about global warming are so reluctant to adopt the obvious short-term solution - the bridge until the day when we have affordable renewable energy - of nuclear power. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Back in George W. Bush's second term, when diplomatic realism began to overtake foolish bellicosity, the president developed one of his patented nicknames for the two most powerful neoconservative journalists, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer: he called them 'the Bomber Boys.' ~ Joe Klein

The 2014 election has given the GOP the rare opportunity to retroactively redeem its brand. The conventional perception, incessantly repeated by Democrats and the media, is that Washington dysfunction is the work of the Party of No. Expose the real agent of do-nothing. Show that, when Harry Reid can no longer consign House-passed legislation to oblivion, Congress can actually work. ~ Charles Krauthammer

In reality, Kyoto was a huge transfer of resources from the United States to the Third World, under the guise of environmental protection. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public
and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The Houthi have local religious grievances, being Shiites in a majority Sunni land. But they are also agents of Shiite Iran, which arms, trains, and advises them. Their slogan - 'God is great. Death to America. Death to Israel' - could have been written in Persian. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The war is not going well and it is time to say why ... It has been fought with half-measures. It has been fought with an eye on the wishes of our 'coalition partners.' It has been fought to assuage the Arab 'street.' It has been fought to satisfy the diplomats rather than the generals ... why have we not loosed the B-52s and the B-2s to carpet-bomb Taliban positions? And why are we giving the Taliban sanctuary in their cities? We could drop leaflets giving civilians 48 hours to evacuate, after which the cities become legitimate military targets. ~ Charles Krauthammer

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics - in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations - is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The international community lies at the center of the Obama foreign policy. Unfortunately, it is a fiction. There is no such thing. Different countries have different histories, geographies, necessities, and interests. There's no natural, inherent, or enduring international community. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Increasing public safety almost always means restricting liberties. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Obama is clearly a narcissist in the non-scientific use of the word. He is so self-involved, you see it from his rise.There's not anyone of independent stature around him. There was in the first term, because he needed them to prop him up. But now that he entered a second term, he's the master of the universe, so there's nobody around him. He is impervious to outside advice, real advice that he takes. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The only reason the president insists on raising [tax] rates is because he knows it will destroy Republican unity, it will cause a complete fracture of the Republican majority in the house, it will hand him a Congress that he can then manipulate for the next two years at least because the Republicans will be neutered ... This is entirely a political action, a way to get a surrender from the Republicans. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Loyalty to the President is great, but loyalty to truth, integrity, and country is even better. ~ Charles Krauthammer

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. ~ Charles Krauthammer

History is not just cruel. It is witty. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The one thing that's always been the center of my political thinking - and it goes back to when I was 19 and editor of my college paper - is an abhorrence of the extreme. ~ Charles Krauthammer

There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today's politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing. ~ Charles Krauthammer

So a Holocaust-denying, virulently anti-Semitic, aspiring genocidist, on the verge of acquiring weapons of the apocalypse, believes that the end is not only near but nearer than the next American presidential election. (Pity the Democrats. They cannot catch a break.) This kind of man would have, to put it gently, less inhibition about starting Armageddon than a normal person. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Obama's Democrats have become the part of no. Real cuts to federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell no. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Identity politics is the mother's milk of the Democratic Left. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The Internet is a cauldron of anger every day, every year, election year or not, with unemployment at 10 percent or at two percent. It isn't exactly a good index of what's happening. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The conscious deployment of a double standard directed at the Jewish state and at no other state in the world, the willingness systematically to condemn the Jewish state for things others are not condemned for - this is not a higher standard. It is a discriminatory standard. And discrimination against Jews has a name too. The word for it is antisemitism. Time, February 26, 1990 ~ Charles Krauthammer

[I]t is more than slightly ironic that Democrats, the fiercely pro-choice party, reserve free choice for aborting a fetus, while denying it for such matters as choosing your child's school or joining a union. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I distrust all multiculturalism, liberal or conservative. The Balkans amply demonstrate the perils of Balkanization. ~ Charles Krauthammer

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. ~ Charles Krauthammer

This is how the great post-partisan, post-racial, New Politics presidency ends-not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a desperate election-eve plea for ethnic retribution. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The indecisiveness and ambivalence so devastatingly described by both of Obama's previous secretaries of defense, Leon Panetta and Bob Gates, are already beginning to characterize the Syria campaign. ~ Charles Krauthammer

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. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Historically, multilateralism is a way for weak countries to multiply their power by attaching themselves to stronger ones. But multilateralism imposed on Great Powers, and particularly on a unipolar power, is intended to restrain that power. Which is precisely why France is an ardent multilateralist. But why should America be? ~ Charles Krauthammer

Truman left in the middle of an unpopular war, a war of choice. Truman didn't have to go into South Korea. And he was reviled and ridiculed for the stalemate that resulted. Now, he's seen as one of the great presidents of the 20th century. ~ Charles Krauthammer

To go into Ukraine and to take over, to invade Crimea, is a huge step. And [Russian President Vladimir Putin] would only have done it with a president who has shown from the very beginning that [President Obama] is living in a fantasy world ... They imagine the world as a new interconnected world where climate change is the biggest threat and they are shocked that the Russians actually are interested in territory. ~ Charles Krauthammer

If the president signs any of it, good. If he vetoes, it will be clarifying. Who then will be the party of no? The vetoed legislation would become the framework for a 2016 GOP platform. Let the debate begin. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Americans abroad have long been accused of such blinging arrogance and display. I find the charge generally unfair. Arrogance is incorrectly ascribed to what is really the cultural clumsiness of an insular (if continental) people less exposed to foreign ways and languages than most other people on Earth.
True, America as a nation is not very good at humility. But it would be completely unnatural for the dominant military, cultural and technological power on the plant to adopt the demeanor or, say, Liechtenstein. The ensuing criticism is particularly grating when it comes from the likes of the French, British, Spanish, Dutch (there are many others) who just yesterday claimed dominion over every land and people their Captain Cooks ever stumbled upon. ~ Charles Krauthammer

It is ridiculous to sue the president on a Wednesday because he oversteps the law, as he has done a dozen times illegally and unconstitutionally, and then on a Thursday say that he should overstep the law, contradict the law that passed in 2008 and deal with this himself. ~ Charles Krauthammer