Charles Krauthammer: Trending quotes

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Charles Krauthammer: 156 quotes0 likes

“My proposition is this: A vast number of Americans who oppose legalization and fear new waves of immigration would change their minds if we could radically reduce new — i. e., future — illegal immigration. Forget employer sanctions. Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won't do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put in cameras. Put in sensors. Put out lots of patrols.”

Charles Krauthammer

"First a wall — then amnesty" in The Washington Post (7 April 2006) https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2006/04/07/first-a-wall-then-amnesty/3a4e0da4-653c-45fe-b651-59e0f06d34c3/?utm_term=.21a76dc8d370 2000s, 2006

“I never had a Marxist phase. If I did it lasted a weekend, and it must have been a hell of a weekend because I don’t remember it…”

Charles Krauthammer

2010s, 2015, Interview with Bill Kristol (2015)

“In 1980, Reagan had to do just one thing: pass the threshold test for acceptability. He won that election because he did, especially in the debate with Jimmy Carter in which Reagan showed himself to be genial, self-assured and, above all, nonthreatening. You may not like all his policies, but you could safely entrust the nation to him. Trump badly needs to pass that threshold. If character is destiny, he won’t.”

Charles Krauthammer

2010s, 2016, Donald Trump and the fitness threshold (2016)

“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

Column, January 2, 2009, "Moral clarity in Gaza" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer010209.php3 at jewishworldreview.com. 2000s, 2009

“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

Originally column published as "No-Respect Politics" in The Washington Post (26 July 2002) https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2002/07/26/no-respect-politics/f7f00171-0731-4fd8-9c07-7fae9ecb725f/ Source: 2010s, 2013, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics (2013), Chapter 3 : Pride and Prejudices, "The Central Axiom of Partisan Politics".

“For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction.”

Charles Krauthammer

2010s, 2011, Are we alone in the universe? (2011)

“If you’re very very rich, you can buy your Senate seat by spending as much of your money as you want. Meanwhile, your poor plebian opponent is running around groveling for the small contributions allowed by law. Hence the Corzines and the Kohls, who parachute into Congress seemingly out of nowhere. Having given this leg up to the rich, we should resist packing our legislatures with yet more privileged parachutists, the well-born. True, the Brits did it that way for centuries, but with characteristic honesty. They established a house of Parliament exclusively for high-born twits and ensconced them there for life. There they chatter away in supreme irrelevance deep into their dotage. Problem is that the U. S. Senate retains House of Commons powers even as it develops a House of Lords membership.”

Charles Krauthammer

Column, December 19, 2008, "The U.S. House of Lords?" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer121908.php3 at jewishworldreview.com. 2000s, 2008

“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

2010s, 2014, Thought Police on Patrol (2014)

“The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline — or continued ascendancy — is in our hands.”

Charles Krauthammer

Article, October 19, 2009, "Decline is a Choice" http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/056lfnpr.asp at weeklystandard.com. 2000s, 2009

“Look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."”

Charles Krauthammer

And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated. How could we? Column, July 17, 2009, "The Moon We Left Behind" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer071709.php3#.U34lesJOWUk at washingtonpost.com, July 17, 2009. 2000s, 2009

“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

2010s, 2013, Detroit Ran Into The Inviolable Rule Of Economics (2013)

“Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism.”

Charles Krauthammer

Column, April 2, 2009, "Obama’s Ultimate Agenda" http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer040309.php3 at jewishworldreview.com. 2000s, 2009

“The new Detroit churning out Schumer-mobiles will make the steel mills of the Soviet Union look the model of efficiency.”

Charles Krauthammer

Column, November 28, 2008, "From market economy to political economy" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer112808.php3 at jewishworldreview.com. 2000s, 2008

“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

2010s, 2010, The great peasant revolt of 2010 (2010)

“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

Column, March 15, 2012, "Obama's oil flimflam" http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer031512.php3#.U4T9R8JOWUk at jewishworldreview.com. 2010s, 2012

“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

International Herald Tribune (31 October 1990), as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), edited by Robert Andrews, p. 711
1990s, 1990

“Once again, the world is faced with a transcendent conflict between those who love life and those who love death both for themselves and their enemies. Which is why we tremble. Upon witnessing the first atomic bomb explode at the Trinity site at Alamogordo, J. Robert Oppenheimer recited a verse from the Hindu scripture "Bhagavad Gita": "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." We tremble because for the first time in history, nihilism will soon be armed with the ultimate weapons of annihilation. For the first time in history, the nihilist will have the means to match his ends. Which is why the war declared upon us on September 11 is the most urgent not only of our lives, but in the life of civilization itself.”

Charles Krauthammer

2000s, 2001, The Enemy is not Islam. It is Nihilism (2001)

“In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement — the number restriction (two and only two) — is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.”

Charles Krauthammer

2000s, 2006, Pandora and Polygamy (2006)

“I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one — and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future — there is no point in America committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise. For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.”

Charles Krauthammer

2010s, 2013, Obama's war on global warming is economic suicide (2013)

“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

2010s, 2010, One year out: Obama's fall (2010)