Top 100 Charles Krauthammer Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “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

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

— 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. “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. “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

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

— 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. “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

14. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Where religion is trivialized, one is unlikely to find persecution.”

— Charles Krauthammer

23. “I think if you’re going to master policy, especially world affairs, you’ve got to know history.”

— Charles Krauthammer

24. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

27. “The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster.”

— Charles Krauthammer

28. “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

29. “As Chesterton once put it unkindly, ‘Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe anything.”

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

39. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

42. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

45. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer

47. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer

49. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer