Quotes from Charles Krauthammer

What the critics don't seem to recognize is that the Paris agreement itself was a huge failure. It contained no uniform commitments and no enforcement provisions. Sure, the whole world signed. But onto what? A voluntary set of vaporous promises. China pledged to 'achieve the peaking of [carbon dioxide] emissions around 2030.' Meaning that they rise for another 13 years.

America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization.

When Social Security began making monthly distributions in 1940, there were 160 workers for every senior receiving benefits. In 1950, there were 16.5; today, 3; in 20 years, there will be but 2. Now, the average senior receives in Social Security about a third of what the average worker makes. Applying that ratio retroactively, this means that in 1940, the average worker had to pay only 0.2% of his salary to sustain the older folks of his time; in 1950, 2%; today, 11%; in 20 years, 17%.

As for knowing the self of others, forget it. Know what they do and judge them by their works.

The sight of these two vying for custody of that pathetic brood makes you wonder how a society that requires licenses for drivers manages without requiring them for parents.

What matters? Lives of the good and the great, the innocence of dogs, the cunning of cats, the elegance of nature, the wonders of space, the perfectly thrown outfield assist, the difference between historical guilt and historical responsibility, homage and sacrilege in monumental architecture, fashions and follies and the finer uses of the F-word.

Turns out we need to know one more thing on earth: politics--because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither.

The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly--to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state--that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution.

The Supreme Court decision upholding affirmative action is incoherent, disingenuous, intellectually muddled and morally confused. Yet it is welcome.

even God cannot match the cruelty of his creation. For every Santorini, there are a hundred massacres of innocents. And that is the work of man--more particularly, the work of politics, of groups of men organized to gain and exercise power.

John] Adams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. That's politics done right, hard-earned, often by war.

Both the Left and the Right have a long history of advocating American retreat and retrenchment. The difference is that liberals want to come home because they think we are not good enough for the world. Conservatives want to wash their hands of the world because they think the world is not good enough for us.

Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase "women and children"?

Or as Chesterton put it, "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.

International law is useful in regulating fishery rights off Newfoundland but they have nothing to say about matters of war and peace, particularly between civilized states and terrorist states.

The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help.

my war on commas. They are a pestilence. They must be stopped.

only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability. Without Churchill the world today would be unrecognizable--dark, impoverished, tortured.

Fermat's last theorem,

politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness.

I must study politics and war," wrote John Adams, "that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

mass destruction are the only threat facing the post–Cold War world. They are only the most obvious. Other threats exist, but they are more speculative and can be seen today only in outline: the rise, for example, of intolerant aggressive nationalism in a disintegrating communist bloc (in one extreme

The point of the superpower is not to invade, it's not to drop the bombs, it's to be so strong that when you issue a warning, secretly or publicly, the other guy who listens and doesn't do it.

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