Quotes from Charles Krauthammer

Take away Churchill in 1940...Nazism would have prevailed. Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known.

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?

refuses to consider

It is part of the trivialization of politics that we give endless attention to the inner life of the politician - his private thoughts, his inner demons - at the expense of his outer life.

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

Terror attacks are now 'man-caused disasters.' And the 'global war on terror' is no more. It is an 'overseas contingency operation.' Nidal Hassan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. but the massacre remains officially classified as an act not of terrorism but of 'workplace violence.

We've had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepherd rode Freedom 7 in 1961. If we had put off space exploration until these earthbound social and economic conundrums were solved, our rocketry would be about where North Korea's is today.

One might say that romance with revolution died with Solzhenitsyn. The line from Bastille to the gulag is not straight, but the connection is unmistakable. Modern totalitarianism has its roots in 1789. 'The spirit of the French Revolution has always been present in the social life of our country,' said Gorbachev during his visit to France last week. Few attempts at ingratiation have been more true or more damning.

You're betraying your whole life if you don't say what you think—and you don't say it honestly and bluntly.

Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics.

Do not misunderstand. There is a nuclear problem, especially in the form of nuclear proliferation. There are environmental problems. And every society has economic problems. But there is a difference between a problem and panic.

mention chess and most people's eyes glaze over. They think of two old geezers, one of whom has died but no one has noticed, in overstuff armchairs at the Diogenes Club.

Remember that when the people or the legislature or the media approve something with unanimity, they're probably wrong. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which essentially launched the United States into the Vietnam war. It passed the US Senate 88 to 2. It passed the House 410 to 0. That should have been a warning.

It is true that other countries, particularly in Europe, have in the past several decades opened themselves up to immigration. But the real problem is not immigration but assimilation. Anyone can do immigration. But if you don't assimilate the immigrants—France, for example, has vast, isolated exurban immigrant slums with populations totally alienated from the polity and the general culture—then immigration becomes not an asset but a liability.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: DEAD WHITE MALE

As historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote, Israel is 'the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.

polygamists. But I'm not the one who put them

Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.

Constitutionalism as a guiding political tendency will require careful and thoughtful development, as did jurisprudential originalism. But its wide appeal and philosophical depth make it a promising first step to a conservative future.

On the day the Arabs—and the Palestinians in particular—make a collective decision to accept the Jewish state, there will be peace, as Israel proved with its treaties with Egypt and Jordan.

Israel is the world's only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation—is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.

On the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz, mourning dead Jews is easy. And, forgive me, cheap. Want to truly honor the dead? Show solidarity with the living—Israel and its six million Jews. Make "never again" more than an empty phrase. It took Nazi Germany seven years to kill six million Jews. It would take a nuclear Iran one day.

It is not just wrong but dangerous to underestimate the rationality of regimes that profess the craziest of ends. The very designation "crazy state" inclines those sure of their own sanity to let down their guard. Europe catastrophically underestimated Hitler because he was plainly a madman. That he was. It did not prevent him from conquering Europe.

The playbook is well known. As Czech president (and economist) Vaclav Klaus once explained, environmentalism is the successor to failed socialism as justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of experts. Only now it acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.