Top 100 Charles Krauthammer Quotes
#1. Every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.
Charles Krauthammer
#3. 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
#4. Who else but that oracle of American liberalism, the New York Times, could run the puzzled headline: "Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling." But? How about this wild theory: If you lock up the criminals, crime declines.
Charles Krauthammer
#5. 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
#6. Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.
Charles Krauthammer
#7. The U.N. is worse than disaster. The U.N. creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful U.N. Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty and anti-Semitic, among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.
Charles Krauthammer
#8. The world is a Hobbesian state of nature in which the struggle for domination is the very essence of international life.
Charles Krauthammer
#10. 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
#11. I think if you're going to master policy, especially world affairs, you've got to know history.
Charles Krauthammer
#12. Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.
Charles Krauthammer
#13. Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.
Charles Krauthammer
#14. 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
#15. Clashes of values and the struggle for primacy constitute a constant in human history that accounts for that other constant - conflict and war.
Charles Krauthammer
#16. Under our constitutional system, the executive executes the laws that Congress has passed. It should not be executing laws that Congress has rejected.
Charles Krauthammer
#17. In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.
Charles Krauthammer
#18. I don't know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they're capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn't scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there's no telling what might have ensued.
Charles Krauthammer
#19. The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.
Charles Krauthammer
#20. 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
#21. To his credit, Obama didn't just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something - to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity.
Charles Krauthammer
#22. 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.
Charles Krauthammer
#23. 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
#24. There's a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality.
Charles Krauthammer
#26. 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
#27. Newt Gingrich had to work hard - getting Republican candidates to sign the Contract with America - to nationalize the election that swept Republicans to victory in 1994. A Democratic anti-Tea Party campaign would do that for the Republicans - nationalize the election, gratis - in 2010.
Charles Krauthammer
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Pass legislation. When Obama signs, you've shown seriousness and the ability to govern. When he vetoes, you've clarified the differences between party philosophies and prepared the ground for 2016.
Charles Krauthammer
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Chess: It's like alcohol. It's a drug. I have to control it, or it could overwhelm me. I have a regular Monday night game at my home, and I do play a little online.
Charles Krauthammer
#35. Guerrilla war is a test of wills. Obama's actual objectives - rollback in Iraq, containment in Syria - are not unreasonable. But they require commitment and determination. In other words, will. You can't just make one speech declaring war, then disappear and go fundraising.
Charles Krauthammer
#36. I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.
Charles Krauthammer
#37. 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
#38. Loyalty to the President is great, but loyalty to truth, integrity, and country is even better.
Charles Krauthammer
#39. Obama has committed the U.S. to war on the Islamic State. To then allow within a month an allied enclave to be overrun - and perhaps annihilated - would be a major blow.
Charles Krauthammer
#41. If Obama has his way, the change that is coming is a new America: 'fair,' leveled and social democratic. Obama didn't get elected to warranty your muffler. He's here to warranty your life.
Charles Krauthammer
#43. I think the editorial page of the Washington Post is the best in the country. I think the editorials - considering it's a liberal town, liberal constituency and from the liberal tradition - I think it's the best editorial page around. It's quite balanced.
Charles Krauthammer
#44. Washington is the only place in the world where a gaffe is when a politician accidently speaks the truth.
Charles Krauthammer
#45. We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie, and rage.
Charles Krauthammer
#46. 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
#47. 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
#49. [I]t's not the advertising, it's the dog food. Every time anybody has a look at it or has a lick of it, they don't like it.
Charles Krauthammer
#50. [Barack Obama failed to sell a health care reform plan to American voters] because the utter implausibility of its central promise - expanded coverage at lower cost - led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes and more debt.
Charles Krauthammer
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. If you subsidize apples, you get more apples; if you subsidize unemployment, you get more of it.
Charles Krauthammer
#55. There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.
Charles Krauthammer
#56. When you have the worst disaster in American history, you've got to be attuned to expectations,.
Charles Krauthammer
#57. Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare.
Charles Krauthammer
#59. I believe in what I believe, and I think after all these years I've heard a lot of arguments, and I'm convinced by the superiority of the arguments that are made on the conservative side. I think that's a better way to run a society.
Charles Krauthammer
#60. 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
#61. After endless days of commuting on the freeway to an antiseptic, sealed-window office, there is a great urge to backpack in the woods and build a fire.
Charles Krauthammer
#62. If [Bush's] successors don't screw it up, within 10 years NASA will have us back to where we belong
on other worlds.
Charles Krauthammer
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. This week, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized control of the Yemeni government, heretofore pro-American. In September, they overran Sanaa, the capital. On Tuesday, they seized the presidential palace. On Thursday, they forced the president to resign.
Charles Krauthammer
#69. Preemption is a kind of pre-deterrence that stops the threat at an earlier, safer stage.
Charles Krauthammer
#70. With our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy.
Charles Krauthammer
#72. 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
#73. I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer.
Charles Krauthammer
#74. 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
#75. Tuesday's victory was big. But it did nothing more than level the playing field and give you a shot. Take it.
Charles Krauthammer
#76. 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
#77. The Brady Bill's only effect will be to desensitize the public to regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.
Charles Krauthammer
#79. Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are.
Charles Krauthammer
#80. 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
#81. Great leaders are willing to retire unloved and unpopular as the price for great exertion.
Charles Krauthammer
#82. 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
#84. Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase "women and children"?
Charles Krauthammer
#85. I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart.
Charles Krauthammer
#86. 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
#87. Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. [ ... ] For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians.
Charles Krauthammer
#88. Whenever you're faced with an explanation of what's going on in Washington, the choice between incompetence and conspiracy, always choose incompetence.
Charles Krauthammer
#89. 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
#90. Ron Paul is not going to be president, so we don't have to worry about who's going to be in his cabinet.
Charles Krauthammer
#91. Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics. You 'take in' a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.
Charles Krauthammer
#92. Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.
Charles Krauthammer
#94. 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
#95. When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back.
Charles Krauthammer
#96. 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
#97. The Iraquis can see it. The Kurds can feel it. The jihadists are counting on it.
Charles Krauthammer
#98. [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
#99. 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
#100. The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help.
Charles Krauthammer
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