Top 100 Charles Krauthammer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.”

— Charles Krauthammer

2. “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

3. “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.”

— Charles Krauthammer

4. “There’s a reason why in New York Harbor we have the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Equality.”

— Charles Krauthammer

5. “Better to be paralyzed from the neck down than the neck up.”

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

7. “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

8. “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

9. “Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible.”

— Charles Krauthammer

10. “Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic – purely symbolic – move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.”

— Charles Krauthammer

11. “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

12. “The free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism.”

— Charles Krauthammer

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.”

— Charles Krauthammer

18. “In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.”

— Charles Krauthammer

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Identity politics is the mother’s milk of the Democratic Left.”

— Charles Krauthammer

26. “Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.”

— Charles Krauthammer

27. “I distrust all multiculturalism, liberal or conservative. The Balkans amply demonstrate the perils of Balkanization.”

— Charles Krauthammer

28. “I don’t really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart.”

— Charles Krauthammer

29. “Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.”

— Charles Krauthammer

30. “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

31. “Middleness is the very enemy of the bold.”

— Charles Krauthammer

32. “Obsession with self is the motif of our time.”

— Charles Krauthammer

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Preemption is a kind of pre-deterrence that stops the threat at an earlier, safer stage.”

— Charles Krauthammer

36. “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

37. “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

38. “History is not just cruel. It is witty.”

— Charles Krauthammer

39. “The Brady Bill’s only effect will be to desensitize the public to regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.”

— Charles Krauthammer

40. “I don’t mind going into a liberal lion’s den. That’s where you test yourself.”

— Charles Krauthammer

41. “A three-year diet of rubber chicken and occasional crow.”

— Charles Krauthammer

42. “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. “We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie, and rage.”

— Charles Krauthammer

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “Great leaders are willing to retire unloved and unpopular as the price for great exertion.”

— Charles Krauthammer

50. “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