David Frum Quotes

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

The habit of going to your congressman's town hall and asking questions, that's powerful in a way that shouting slogans or getting arrested is not, that is completely counterproductive.

Journalists have to do their job. And journalists have to resist emotionalism. You have to keep your cool and to continue to do your job until you're prevented.

I want people to understand that, look, we're in a period of democratic deficit, democratic recession. There are fewer democracies in the world today than in 2005, and in many of the countries that are still technically democracies, we're seeing a reduction in the rule of law. And that's especially true in Central Europe, but it's also true of places like South Africa, the Philippines.

We're not free because other people are nice, maybe other people aren't nice that day. We're free because we expect the institutions of government to work impersonally. That we expect people in government to understand they don't work for the president or the prime minister, they work for the government. And the government is always there.

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

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

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.

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

So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.

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

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.

I think the single most important question is how do you maximize the number of children who grow up in stable two-parent households. We know in all kinds of ways it makes a huge difference to how kids come out and we are hardening into a caste society where some kids do better in all kinds of ways because they have two parents and others don't.

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

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.

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

Canada has a real civil service, which the United States doesn't have, an independent civil service. Canada also has a stronger federal system.

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

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

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

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.

I don't think that disasters have to be spectacular. They can be a slow corrosion.

We live in an age of de-democratization. The number of democracies in the world has been going backwards since 2005, and even many existing democracies including in Europe have been becoming less democratic.

When we talk about authoritarianism, we conjure up out-of-date visions from the 1930s. But we are no more likely to do authoritarian government the way they did in the 1930s then we're likely to address or talk or do any of our other business in the way they did it in the 1930s.

Normally what happens in a new presidency is the president has a big agenda, and Congress is full of people with human weaknesses. And so the president indulges the human weaknesses of members of Congress in order to pass his agenda. This time it's the other way around. Donald Trump does not have much of an agenda. Congress burns with this intense Republican agenda and so does Congress that has to put up with the human weaknesses of the president in order to get a signature on the things it desperately wants to pass.

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.

Elites are inevitable in politics. That is how politics is going to work. The question is, are your elites responsible, public-spirited? Do they think about the interests of others, not just themselves? And the story of Western politics since the beginning of the century is that as elites become more separated, more selfish, as they leave behind their populations and don't think about them, they become discredited. And the people look for alternatives. But the alternative is worse. Those rules of the game protect us all. And they are more precious than almost any political outcome.

[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.

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

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.

Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.

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.

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

I am a very conservative person. And there are a lot of things that Donald Trump's government or administration is doing that I might agree with. The point is we have to defend the rules of the game. And one of the things that has empowered Donald Trump is that not enough people are serious enough about defending the rules of the game, maybe because they don't understand how endangered those rules are.

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.

Donald Trump is behaving in an extremely provocative way toward China, having first cancelled the TPP and alienated America's friends in the region. Same thing that he's authorizing much riskier gambits against ISIS, having alienated many of America's allies and friends in the region.

Donald Trump is the least unpopular thing about today's Republican Party. I mean, the idea that a Mitch McConnell or a Paul Ryan could say, "Let's toss Trump overboard and return to our program of plutocratic politics, health care removal, massive income tax cuts for the affluent, deregulation of finance" - if they cut loose from Donald Trump, it's like, you know, storm in channel, continent cut off. If they cut loose from him, they are much likelier to sink.

Donald Trump, as a businessman, he's not much of a builder and he's not much of dealmaker and he certainly isn't very good at making expenses line up with income. But he is a marketing genius. He must have seen an empty market niche that no one but him filled.

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

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.

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

Obviously, Donald Trump won't be impeached or removed so long as the Republicans hold even one House of Congress. And even should they lose both in November of 2018, launching an impeachment - as the Republicans discovered with Bill Clinton - is very dangerous to the impeaching party. Unless you have a highly credible set of extremely damning facts, you turn a constitutional crisis into a political crisis. You rally potential supporters of the impeached president to him. You make his base bigger. So I imagine that he is likely to serve out the full term.

We all have more at stake in the rules of the game than we do in the outcomes of the game. When that changes, that's when you begin to lose democracy.

Donald Trump is not supposed to save jobs one by one. He's supposed to build a sound macro economy in which private enterprises create jobs.

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

Democracy requires you to learn how to lose as well as how to exercise power when you win. And that requires restraint all around. One of the reasons it works is because when you win you don't do things that are so upsetting to the losers that they feel like they have less, they have more to gain by turning over the system.

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.

I keep telling my American friends, "If you think of Donald Trump as only something that is happening inside the United States, you're missing it." Because there are Trump-like events happening across the Western world, in Warsaw Pact countries, in France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands. As we speak, the second-largest party in the Dutch legislature - who's more level-headed than the Dutch? - is Geert Wilders's party, which is a very Trump-like party, and they've got 33 out of 150 seats.