Author Profile
Charles Krauthammer
1950 – 2018 • American • Journalist
84
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 84 quotesAs most who have engaged in competitive sports know, there's nothing to match the amplitude of emotion brought by losing.— Charles Krauthammer
Every civilization is founded on sins - every single one. Dispossession, violence, appropriation. What distinguishes civilizations are the ones who rise above it.— Charles Krauthammer
In the end, what brings civilizations down is when the elites lose confidence in the rightness of their cause.— Charles Krauthammer
There was once a philosopher who said, 'I don't believe in God, but I fear him greatly.' That's about where I am.— Charles Krauthammer
The way that Trump spoke about the outside world was the most aggressive, most hyper-nationalist, and in some ways most hostile of any inaugural address I think since the Second World War.— Charles Krauthammer
If you get a call to go to a certain place in the middle of the night to pick up stolen goods, and it turns out the stolen goods don't show up but the cops show up, I think you're going to have a very weak story saying, 'Well, I got swindled here.'— Charles Krauthammer
I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation's destiny.— Charles Krauthammer
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
I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.— Charles Krauthammer
I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.— Charles Krauthammer
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
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
Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.— Charles Krauthammer
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
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
Nuclear doctrine consists of thinking the unthinkable. It involves making threats and promising retaliation that is cruel and destructive beyond imagining. But it has its purpose: to prevent war in the first place.— Charles Krauthammer
The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.— Charles Krauthammer
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
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
Every new president flatters himself that he, kinder and gentler, is beginning the world anew. Yet, when Barack Obama in his inaugural address reached out to Muslims by saying, 'To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,' his formulation was needlessly defensive and apologetic.— Charles Krauthammer