Charles Krauthammer famous quotes

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

#Country #Allies #Permission

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

#White #House #Fence

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

#Trust #Country #Witty

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

#New York #Liberty #Reason

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

#Dog #Thinking #Suffering

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

#Stupid #Thinking #Law

Middleness is the very enemy of the bold.
-- Charles Krauthammer

#Enemy

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

#Snakes #Oil #People

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

#Fire #Office #Woods

Post-Watergate morality, by which anything left private is taken as presumptive evidence of wrongdoing.
-- Charles Krauthammer

#Taken #Morality #Evidence

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

#Pride #Power #Men

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

#Choices #Conspiracy #Incompetence

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

#Party #America #Irrelevance

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

#Religious #Believe #Moral

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

#Disaster #Broads #Foreign Policy

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

#Office #President #Worst

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

#Law #Should #Congress

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

#Law #President #Done

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

#World #Politics #Speak

It doesn't take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe - and now Detroit - is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein's Law and yell, 'Stop.' You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.
-- Charles Krauthammer

#Europe #Law #Detroit

I'm The Only Entity On Earth, Other Than Rogue States, That Has Received An Apology From The White House
-- Charles Krauthammer

#Apology #White #House

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

#Years #Other Worlds #Nasa

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

#Mind #Lions #Tests

The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.
-- Charles Krauthammer

#Disappointment #Winning #Expectations

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

#Wall #Lying #Germany

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

#Giving #Stupidity #Credit

[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

#Dog #Looks #Care

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

#Gun #Preparation #Weapons

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

#Mother #Identity #Politics

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

#Years #Long #Society

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

#Expectations #American History #Disaster

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

#President #Nominations #United States

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

#Reality #Kyoto #Environmental

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

#Real #Oil #Promise

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

#Attitude #Winning #Trying

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

#Essence #Lunch #Modern

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

#Lonely #Thinking #Voice

For liberals, the observation that 'the peasants are revolting' is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.
-- Charles Krauthammer

#Swings #People #Common Sense

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

#War #Community #Poverty

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

#Self #Obsession #Motifs

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

#Letting Go #Heart #Thinking

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

#Hypocrisy #Principles #Moral

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

#Together #Genius #Modesty

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

#Names #Ice Cream #Israel

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

#Korea #Cuba #Lasts

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

#Worry #President #Cabinets

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

#War #Europe #World

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

#Believe #Next #Alternatives

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

#War #Iraq #Risk

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

#Careers #Magazines #Republic

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

#Writing #People #Envy

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

#Believe #School #Risk

I think if you're going to master policy, especially world affairs, you've got to know history.
-- Charles Krauthammer

#Thinking #World #Affair

I would say I see myself as a psychiatrist in remission.
-- Charles Krauthammer

#Remission #Psychiatrist