David Frum Quotes

#1. David Frum has been saying - [Donald] Trump is all about conservatism as identity, not conservatism as ideology.

Chris Hayes

#2. [democrats] hated Richard Nixon, and no wonder. It was Nixon who sent Alger Hiss to jail, and Nixon who waged the Vietnam War after the Democrats gave up,

David Frum

#3. There are a lot of wonderful people in America who shouldn't be on the Supreme Court - and a lot who should be on the court who aren't such wonderful people.

David Frum

#4. Why should we not expect self-designated environmental leaders to practice what they preach?

David Frum

#5. America under 30 is a more non-whites place than America over 60. And we know that non-whites and whites vote differently.

David Frum

#6. Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.

David Frum

#7. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel).

David Frum

#8. My mom was truly an iconic figure, a great journalist and a pioneering woman who died at 54 of cancer without ever having revealed to viewers that she was ill.

David Frum

#9. People who watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events.

David Frum

#10. What I say is I am somebody who cares about conservative ideas. I want to see them implemented in governance.

David Frum

#11. The ceiling in the mess was very low, not even eight feet. You can feel the weight of the West Wing above your head, and with the the weight of American memory.

David Frum

#12. The great power the president has is that he is the most prominent person in the biggest media event on the planet. He has the attention of the nation and the world. When he speaks, everybody listens.

David Frum

#13. The Iraq fight itself is probably going to go very, very fast. The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.

David Frum

#14. Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

David Frum

#15. My view on candidates on money is unless it's proven that the donor stole the money, the campaign keeps the money.

David Frum

#16. Look, the media are trapped by changes in the technology and business of their industry.

David Frum

#17. More Irishmen died fighting for Britain in World War I than died fighting against her in all of Ireland's bids for independence combined.

David Frum

#18. One can shape history as much through the facts one omits as through the facts one includes.

David Frum

#19. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don't usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.

David Frum

#20. If right and left are competing to be the biggest victim, who is competing to be the government?

David Frum

#21. [In politics,] when there is no reason to speak, there is a reason not to speak.

David Frum

#22. People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

David Frum

#23. Anyone who can be cool about his first visit to the Oval Office has lost so much body heat that rigor mortis is probably about to set in.

David Frum

#24. An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein - and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.

David Frum

#25. World War II proved a hypothesis that Alexis de Tocqueville advanced a century before: the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense; at its weakest when war is most limited. This is a lesson with enduring relevance to our own times - and our own wars.

David Frum

#26. My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

David Frum

#27. Today's Republican party is too beholden to factions generally.

David Frum

#28. A presidential speech is always the work of many hands.

David Frum

#29. The elite isn't leading anymore. It's trapped.

David Frum

#30. Reagan survived the Iran-Contra scandal because the elements of it that were illegal (aiding anti-communist Nicaraguans) were popular and the things that were unpopular (arming the Iranians) were quite legal.

David Frum

#31. I'm a latecomer to the environmental issue, which for years seemed to me like an excuse for more government regulation. But I can see that in rich societies, voters are paying less attention to economic issues and more to issues of the spirit, including the environment.

David Frum

#32. Maybe it's true that people with less extreme views who are also interested in public affairs have been driven out by a marketplace that doesn't offer them anything of the tone they want to listen to.

David Frum

#33. Events don't happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen.

David Frum

#34. The monster has escaped Elba!" "The tyrant has landed at Cannes!" "Bonaparte meets the troops." "Napoleon approaches Paris." "His Imperial Majesty has entered the capital.

David Frum

#35. I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated.

David Frum

#36. Life, as the signs in the liquor stores say, is too short to drink bad wine. And summer is too short to read bad books.

David Frum

#37. Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.

David Frum

#38. People need to understand that in Washington, the process is the punishment.

David Frum

#39. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.

David Frum

#40. In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

David Frum

#41. I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words.

David Frum

#42. To balance China, the democracies will need new friends - and India with its fast-growing economy, youthful population, and democratic politics seems the obvious candidate.

David Frum

#43. Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox.

David Frum

#44. Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.

David Frum

#45. As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.

David Frum

#46. Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.

David Frum

#47. The big winners under the American fiscal system are the rich, who pay some of the lowest taxes anywhere in the world; the old, who are the main beneficiaries of the American social service state; farmers, rural people. These are Republican constituencies.

David Frum

#48. Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents.

David Frum

#49. We, as conservative intellectuals, should not be in the business of making excuses for bad parliamentary decisions by Republican leaders in Congress.

David Frum

#50. And that is how we intend to destroy the enemy!" The superior shakes his head wearily. "Young man, the Soviets are our adversary. The Navy is the enemy.

David Frum

#51. There is no right to work in a think tank, and these are very privileged positions.

David Frum

#52. We've all been wrong- I certainly have- and we should thank those who set us right. Not always fun, but always best in the end.

David Frum

#53. A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.

David Frum

#54. Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.

David Frum

#55. Whenever you discuss politics, it is always better to use individual names rather then the term neocon.

David Frum

#56. Those who seem to despise half of America will never be trusted to govern any of it. Those who cherish only the country's past will not be entrusted with its future.

David Frum

#57. So if I have two pieces of cake, do I have twice as good an experience as the first piece of cake? One of the things I've found in life is that the first piece of cake is the best.

David Frum

#58. The first decade of the twenty-first century was a crazy bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression.

David Frum

#59. Think tanks do have points of view, and they are absolutely entitled to defend them.

David Frum

#60. The five million people who watch cable news are the political nation, the people who really care.

David Frum