Krauthammer Quotes & Sayings

The free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism. — 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

There's a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality. — Charles Krauthammer

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

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

Indeed, the lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation. — 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. — 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

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

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

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

When you have the worst disaster in American history, you've got to be attuned to expectations,. — Charles Krauthammer

As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy - a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence. — Charles Krauthammer

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

In science, modesty and genius do not coexist well together. (In Washington, modesty and cleverness don't.) Einstein is perhaps the most famous exception to the rule. — 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

The peasants have seen the future - Greece and France - and concluded that it does not work. Hence their opposition to Obama's proudly transformational New Foundation agenda. Their logic is impeccable: Only the most blinkered intellectual could be attempting to introduce social democracy to America precisely when the world's foremost exemplar of that model - Europe - is in chaotic meltdown. — Charles Krauthammer

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

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

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

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

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

[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

[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

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

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

Preemption is a kind of pre-deterrence that stops the threat at an earlier, safer stage. — Charles Krauthammer

When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back. — 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

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

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

No normative critic, conservative or otherwise, equates Islamic terrorism with all Muslims or with all of Islam. Rather, in Charles Krauthammer's words, Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers - according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, that is, more than 80 million souls - it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert. — Dennis Prager

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

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

An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking - and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels - which we possess in staggering abundance - that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live. — Charles Krauthammer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Washington is the only place in the world where a gaffe is when a politician accidently speaks the truth. — 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

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

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

History is not just cruel. It is witty. — 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

Obsession with self is the motif of our time. — Charles Krauthammer

Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own--those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.
Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy--precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations. — Charles Krauthammer

Winning control of the Senate would allow Republicans to pass a whole range of measures now being held up by Reid, often at the behest of the White House. Make it a major reform agenda. The centerpiece might be tax reform, both corporate and individual. It is needed, popular and doable. Then go for the low-hanging fruit enjoying wide bipartisan support, such as the Keystone XL pipeline and natural gas exports, most especially to Eastern Europe. One could then add border security, energy deregulation and health-care reform that repeals the more onerous Obamacare mandates. — Charles Krauthammer

The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster. — Charles Krauthammer

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

The Iraquis can see it. The Kurds can feel it. The jihadists are counting on it. — 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

What made Obama unique was that he was the ultimate charismatic politician
the most unknown stranger ever to achieve the presidency in the United States. No one knew who he was, he came out of nowhere, he had this incredible persona that floated him above the fray, destroyed Hillary, took over the Democratic Party and became president. This is truly unprecedented: A young unknown with no history, no paper trail, no well-known associates, self-created. — Charles Krauthammer

The world is a Hobbesian state of nature in which the struggle for domination is the very essence of international life. — Charles Krauthammer

Where religion is trivialized, one is unlikely to find persecution. — 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

The New York Times denounces America's "dancing with dictators." Guilty as charged. Dance we do. And without apology. With no more apology than Franklin Roosevelt offered when he reportedly said of Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza, "He may be a son of a bitch. But he's our son of a bitch."

Roosevelt was a grownup. He made choices. He slew his dragons one at a time. He understood that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. He understood that in an international arena populated by sons of bitches, you make your distinctions, or you die. — 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 don't mind going into a liberal lion's den. That's where you test yourself. — 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

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

A one-hour work-week ... would minimize the damage that Congress can do. — Charles Krauthammer

Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store. — Charles Krauthammer

In the course of his presidency, Obama has gone from an almost magical charismatic figure to an ordinary politician. Ordinary. Average. — 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

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. — Charles Krauthammer

Now this is a way to approach our healthcare problems: increase the number of tax collectors and decrease the number of doctors - brilliant! — Charles Krauthammer

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

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

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

By what logical principle should the relief of death be granted only the terminally ill? Such a restriction is itself perverse. After all, the terminally ill face only a brief period of suffering. The chronically ill, or the healthy but bereft - they face a lifetime of agony. Why deny them the relief of a humane exit? — 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

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

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

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

What politicians do not understand is that [Ian] Wilmut discovered not so much a technical trick as a new law of nature. We now know that an adult mammalian cell can fire up all the dormant genetic instructions that shut down as it divides and specializes and ages, and thus can become a source of new life. You can outlaw technique; you cannot repeal biology.
Writing after Wilmut's successful cloning of the sheep, Dolly, that research on the cloning of human beings cannot be suppressed. — Charles Krauthammer

Every new president flatters himself that he, kinder and gentler, is beginning the world anew. Yet, when Barack Obama in his inaugural address reached out to Muslims by saying, 'To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,' his formulation was needlessly defensive and apologetic. — Charles Krauthammer

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

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

Twice a year, I have lunch with Dr. George Will and Dr. Charles Krauthammer, who write and speak about important issues in the world, such as politics and war and gay marriage. But at lunch, all we talk about is baseball, which is good because I can't talk fluently about anything else, especially with two guys that, when it comes to intelligence, make me feel like Fred Flintstone.

At lunch one day, Charles said, without apology, "I read the front page for ninety seconds every day, then I go straight to the box scores." To which, George said, "Why do you waste the ninety seconds? — Tim Kurkjian

Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism. — Charles Krauthammer

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

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

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933 ... Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns. — 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

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

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

During the last presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama, asked why he was not wearing a flag pin, answered that it represented "a substitute" for "true patriotism." Bad move. Months later, Obama quietly beat a retreat and began wearing the flag on his lapel. He does so still. — Charles Krauthammer

Israel is not just any small country. It is the only small country - the only country, period - whose neighbors publicly declare its very existence an affront to law, morality and religion and make its extinction an explicit , paramount national goal. Iran, Libya, and Iraq conduct foreign policies designed for the killing of Israelis and the destruction of their state. They choose their allies (Hamas, Hezbollah) and develop their weapons (suicide bombs, poison gas, anthrax, nuclear missiles) accordingly. Countries as far away as Malaysia will not allow a representative of Israel on their soil or even permit the showing of 'Schindler's List' lest it engender sympathy for Zion. — 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

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

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

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