Top 100 Charles Krauthammer Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.”

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “I would say I see myself as a psychiatrist in remission.”

— Charles Krauthammer

57. “Every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.”

— Charles Krauthammer

58. “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

59. “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

60. “I’m The Only Entity On Earth, Other Than Rogue States, That Has Received An Apology From The White House.”

— Charles Krauthammer

61. “Environmentalists are Gaia’s priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment – carbon chastity – they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by and what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.”

— Charles Krauthammer

62. “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

63. “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

64. “The next time you find yourself in the midst of some national hysteria with sensible people losing their heads, with legislatures in panic and with the media buying it all and amplifying it with a kind of megaphone effect, remember this: Remember that a people – even the most sensible people – can all lose their heads at once.”

— Charles Krauthammer

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Post-Watergate morality, by which anything left private is taken as presumptive evidence of wrongdoing.”

— Charles Krauthammer

68. “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

69. “The trouble when people stop believing in God is not that they thereafter believe in nothing; it is that they thereafter believe in anything. In this century, ‘anything’ has included Hitler, Stalin and Mao, authors of the great genocidal madnesses of our time.”

— Charles Krauthammer

70. “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

71. “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

72. “If you subsidize apples, you get more apples; if you subsidize unemployment, you get more of it.”

— Charles Krauthammer

73. “Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.”

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

75. “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

76. “Don’t touch my junk, you airport security goon – my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I’m a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?”

— Charles Krauthammer

77. “When you have the worst disaster in American history, you’ve got to be attuned to expectations,.”

— Charles Krauthammer

78. “If fences don’t work, why is there one around the White House?”

— Charles Krauthammer

79. “It is an axiom of political life that you never raise expectations, whether in a political or military campaign, because your defeats are then magnified and your victories discounted.”

— Charles Krauthammer

80. “Tuesday’s victory was big. But it did nothing more than level the playing field and give you a shot. Take it.”

— Charles Krauthammer

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

— Charles Krauthammer

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer

94. “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

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

— Charles Krauthammer

96. “There are cycles in American politics. US cycles are even more pronounced because we Americans have a totally entrepreneurial presidential system. We don’t have parliamentary opposition parties with a shadow prime minister and shadow cabinets. Every four years, the opposition reinvents itself.”

— Charles Krauthammer

97. “The Iraquis can see it. The Kurds can feel it. The jihadists are counting on it.”

— Charles Krauthammer

98. “When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That’s its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.”

— Charles Krauthammer

99. “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

100. “In modern times we suffer not for our sins – sin having been abolished – but for ideology.”

— Charles Krauthammer