The Point of It All Quotes

“The most powerful case in favor of capital punishment is the claim of justice: Some crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate punishment, the only fitting retribution, is death. This is not a claim to be taken lightly. One purpose of the law is that it ensure that evil be appropriately repaid, that justice be done.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“Chess enjoys a not wholly undeserved reputation for psychic derangement. It is an endeavor associated, when not with frank madness, with oddness and isolation. I remember a psychiatrist friend visiting me at a chess club in downtown Boston once. He walked in, sat down, looked around and said, ‘Jeez, I could run a group here.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“individuals, he believed, should choose and pursue what matters to them.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“As Chesterton once put it unkindly, ‘Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe anything.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“He believed in Einstein’s (apocryphal) dictum that ‘if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“We live in an age that often promotes and idealizes introspection, self-reflection and catharsis. The opening up of one’s emotions and declaring of one’s deepest feelings to the world. Taken to excess, as is all too often the case, these can amount to self-indulgence. My father did not subscribe to this mindset. If there was one thing that he was the complete opposite of, it was self-indulgent: intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, in every sense that I can think of. He did not disregard the self. Actually, I think it’s safe to say he had quite a high self-regard, as I’m sure many of you can recount—especially my mother. But to him, the self just wasn’t all that important. Not because of any inherent sin or moral failing of being self-interested. But quite simply because, ultimately, it is not very interesting. Why focus endlessly inward when there is so much more to explore and understand and experience on the outside: the universe, our world, all the fascinating people in it, the complex activities we busy ourselves with, and the transcendent bonds of love and family and friendship we are able to forge with one another. And so he chose to focus all his gifts, all his exquisite qualities outward to the world beyond himself. We who knew him are all the recipients and beneficiaries of the strength, the warmth, the generosity and the wisdom that he radiated.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange. Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel’s neighborhood. As we speak, Syria’s government is dropping “barrel bombs” filled with nails, shrapnel and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria? And of Iran, which hangs political, religious and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, massively repressive China and Russia?”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“Six months before Israel’s birth, the United Nations had decided by a two-thirds majority that the only just solution to the British departure from Palestine would be the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state side by side. The undeniable fact remains: The Jews accepted that compromise; the Arabs rejected it. With a vengeance. On the day the British pulled down their flag, Israel was invaded by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq—650,000 Jews against 40 million Arabs. Israel prevailed, another miracle. But at a very high cost—not just to the Palestinians displaced as a result of a war designed to extinguish Israel at birth, but also to the Israelis, whose war losses were staggering: 6,373 dead. One percent of the population. In American terms, it would take 35 Vietnam memorials to encompass such a monumental loss of life. You rarely hear about Israel’s terrible suffering in that 1948–49 war. You hear only the Palestinian side. Today, in the same vein, you hear that Israeli settlements and checkpoints and occupation are the continuing root causes of terrorism and instability in the region.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“Given our geography, our tolerant culture and the magnetic attraction of our economy, illegals will always be with us. Our first task, therefore, should be abolishing bilingual education everywhere and requiring that our citizenship tests have strict standards for English language and American civics. The cure for excessive immigration is successful assimilation. The way to prevent European-like immigration catastrophes is to turn every immigrant—and most surely his children—into an American.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“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.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“Australia is the only country that has fought with the United States in every one of its major conflicts since 1914, the good and the bad, the winning and the losing.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors