David Frum Quotes

Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox. ~ David Frum

If right and left are competing to be the biggest victim, who is competing to be the government? ~ David Frum

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

Crown Prince Rupprecht, the heir to the throne of Bavaria who commanded the army group facing the British at the Somme, was the senior direct lineal heir of James Stuart, the Old Pretender of 1715. Had there been any Jacobites left in Britain in 1916, they would have had to regard this south German prince as their rightful king. ~ David Frum

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

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

Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is ... to put it mildly ... severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues. We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don't care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters. ~ David Frum

One can shape history as much through the facts one omits as through the facts one includes. ~ David Frum

The Great Society went wrong for three major reasons. First, the self-organization the Johnson administration promoted turned out to be not the pooling of family and community resources into shops and businesses, but political pressure for government handouts. Second, the Great Society failed to anticipate the perverse side-effects of handing money out to people who have done nothing to earn it. Third, while the Great Society was showering money on the poor, the Supreme Court was with childlike glee smashing to bits traditional methods of maintaining law and order. ~ David Frum

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. ~ David Frum

Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained. ~ David Frum

I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated. ~ David Frum

A generation ago, or two, when there were three channels, plus PBS, and when you needed - when you needed 15 million people to make a living, the media could focus on the broad country. And most people had no choice about getting political information. It was there at 6:30 whether you wanted it or not. ~ David Frum

You've worked hard all your life. You've paid Medicare taxes for almost 30 years. But under the Republican plan, Medicare won't be there for you. Instead of Medicare as it exists now, under the Republican plan you'll get a voucher that will pay as little as half your Medicare costs when you turn 65 - and as little as a quarter in your 80s. And all so that millionaires and billionaires can have a huge tax cut. ~ David Frum

Whenever you discuss politics, it is always better to use individual names rather then the term neocon. ~ David Frum

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

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

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

Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents. ~ David Frum

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

People who watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events. ~ David Frum

What I say is I am somebody who cares about conservative ideas. I want to see them implemented in governance. ~ David Frum

[In politics,] when there is no reason to speak, there is a reason not to speak. ~ David Frum

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

Trump is the producer, writer, and star of an extravaganza performance of the theater of resentment. ~ David Frum

My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached. ~ David Frum

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

When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels," tweeted the sharp social observer Siyanda Mohutsiwa the morning after the 2016 election. ~ David Frum

Events don't happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen. ~ David Frum

Why should we not expect self-designated environmental leaders to practice what they preach? ~ David Frum

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

If you go on TV and say there's no other country in the world where you can be born poor and become rich, you get a huge megaphone. If you tell the truth, which is that most of the studies show actually the United States is worse than anybody except Britain in upward mobility, there is no audience for you. ~ David Frum

The Republican Party was built on a coalition of the nation's biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers. ~ David Frum

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it. ~ David Frum

[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

Why be thrifty when your old age and health care are provided for, no matter how profligate you act in your youth? Why be prudent when the state insures your bank deposits, replaces your flooded-out house, buys all the wheat you can grow? ... Why be diligent when half of your earnings are taken from you and given to the idle? ~ David Frum

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

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

Yet when the hour of decision arrives, it turns out that many conservatives care as little as ever about administrative skill and executive accomplishment. Our party and our movement overwhelmingly respond to symbolic cues. Sarah Palin is exciting and appealing. But what kind of executive is she? None of us have even the remotest idea. ~ David Frum

The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty. ~ David Frum

Democracy is a work in progress. So is democracy's undoing. ~ David Frum

As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer. ~ David Frum

By abrogating all moral standards in their war against Israel, Arab and Muslim leaders initiated a process of moral collapse that has ended by soaking their own societies in blood. The terror they intended to inflict only upon others has rebounded with a hundred times greater horror upon their own lands. ~ David Frum

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

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

Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity. ~ David Frum

Think tanks do have points of view, and they are absolutely entitled to defend them. ~ David Frum

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

Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater's apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II
and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation's sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions. ~ David Frum

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

The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon. ~ David Foster Wallace

Minister every day. Opportunities are all around you. Look for them. Ask the Lord to help you recognize them. You will find that most consist of small, sincere acts that help others become followers of Jesus Christ. ~ David L. Beck

'The Fighter' was about a family struggling to overcome and fighting each other sometimes, and I went back and rewrote this script which I had written for my son initially because my son has mood disorder. ~ David O. Russell

My life more civil is and free
Than any civil polity
Ye princes, keep your realms
And circumscribed power
Not wide as are my dreams
Nor rich as is this hour ~ Henry David Thoreau

The only government that I recognize
and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army
is that power thatestablishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Everyone goes through the ups and downs of living - fretting about the future, worrying about what happened. Music teaches us how to be in the moment. ~ David Sanborn

Don't get trapped into thinking people are halves instead of wholes. ~ David Levithan

You either like something, or you don't; you won't change your opinion because somebody explains why you should like it. ~ David Alpay

When we consider the promises of Christ, risking everything we are and everything we have for His sake is no longer a matter of sacrifice. It's just common sense. ~ David Platt

Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. "Well, Lyndon," Mister Sam answered, "you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once." It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal fluency which the team exuded, and the true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam. ~ David Halberstam

As everything becomes digitized, there's the idea that things that can't be digitized become more valuable. ~ David Byrne

There are many different kinds of radioactive waste and each has its own half-life so, just to be on the safe side and to simplify matters, I base my calculations on the worst one and that's plutonium. ~ David R. Brower

Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. ~ Henry David Thoreau

80% of man's happiness is based on love - love for others, love for self, love for family, love for friends, love for work, love for nature, and love for being loved. ~ Ogwo David Emenike

Old age is not as honorable as death, but most people seek it. ~ David Gemmell

To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts. ~ David Bellos

Some people are given relatively fair lives. But others-they carry the burden of the unfairness of the world. ~ David Levithan

What can educators do to foster real intelligence?..We can attempt to teach the things that one might imagine the earth would teach us: silence, humility, holiness, connectedness, courtesy, beauty, celebration, giving, restoration, obligation, and wildness. ~ David W. Orr

The first (and so far only) blind person to climb Mount Everest. Today he climbs with a grid of over six hundred tiny electrodes in his mouth, called the BrainPort.30 ~ David Eagleman

Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it's not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly. ~ David Allen

People overestimate what they can accomplish in the near term and underestimate what they can accomplish in the long term. ~ David House

I had read the novel and I had heard David Lean was going to direct it - and it came as a surprise to me because American actors, if given the chance, can do style as well as anybody and speak as well as anybody. ~ Rod Steiger

Those words you want to say right now? Don't say them.' He smiled and cuffed my cheek with something close to real affection. 'And that, my friend, is the secret to living a long life'. ~ David Benioff

I never went to business school. I was just bumbling through a lot of my life. I was like the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. ~ David Geffen

The music plays ... and your sense of reality is heightened to a dream. ~ David Mutti Clark

There was a terrible stretch of time in Einar's life - from the time Hans left Bluetooth until the day he met Greta at the academy - when he lived without anyone to reveal his secrets to. Lili could remember that, the feeling of biting down on one's thoughts and feelings and storing them up for no one. ~ David Ebershoff

Change allows us to exit the comfortable and enter the improved. ~ David Cottrell

Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing. We try to see ourselves in them. The same I.D.-relation, however, also means that we try to see them in ourselves. When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it's less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with. Not only does this cause some angst personally, but the angst increases because, nationally, everybody else is absorbing six-hour doses and identifying with pretty people and valuing prettiness more, too. This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences. ~ David Foster Wallace

To be perfectly honest, I feel I have a duty to use my celebrity status in a positive way. ~ David Schwimmer

We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. ~ David Graeber

My, my! That does sound serious.
He's almost delirious,
But let's not give up yet.
The sun still hasn't set
On this grim tale of grief.
Of course, as its chief Architect,
I know how it ends.
But this river has more bends
Before it flows into the sea.
So I'll forgo my omnipotence
And keep you in the dark.
Oooooo! What suspense!
I just love being me! ~ David Elliott

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing. ~ David Sanborn

Believe me, if Archimedes ever had the grand entrance of a girl as pretty as Gloria to look forward to, he would never have spent so much time calculating the value of Pi. He would have been baking her a Pie! If Euclid had ever beheld a vision of loveliness like the one I see walking into my anti-math class, he would have forgotten all the geometry of lines and planes, and concentrated on the sweet simplicity of soft curves. If Pythagoras had ever had a girl look at him the way Gloria's eyes fix in my direction, he would have given up his calculations on the hypotenuse of right triangles and run for the hills to pick a bouquet of wildflowers. ~ David Klass

Here is the truth - actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.
- David Foster Wallace, from The Pale King ~ David Foster Wallace

We have defied the day as it was set out for us. ~ David Levithan

Do three things well, not ten things badly. ~ David Segrove

Society is nothing more than people cooperating with other people they'd much rather murder. ~ David Wong

I stared at him. David, that's prison movies, not zombie movie. ~ Jesse Petersen

You can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I have nothing against the North Koreans but this Kim Jong Un has got a screw loose. A member of his cabinet, his security minister, nods off, falls sleep. We've all done it. Kim Jong Un takes the guy out and has him executed, just for just falling asleep. Oh, and he was also deflating footballs. ~ David Letterman

Everything changed after AIDS," Dr. Molnár had just explained to him. "From then on, blood was more dangerous than shit. ~ David Cronenberg

I am very traditional as a man. I am not modern and never have been. I think I was born 50 years of age and out of my time. ~ David Suchet

The way you spend Christmas is far more important than how much. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Your body is not the real you. It's just the physical house you live in. The real you is your spirit, which will live on forever. ~ David Berg