David Frum Quotations

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Liberals did well, and not only in the 'Michael Moore' precincts, but also in a lot of areas where their scandals should have hurt them more.

left behind a country that was more dynamic, more competitive, more tolerant, less deferential, less self-confident, less united, more socially equal, less economically equal, more expressive, more risk-averse, more sexual, less literate, less polite, less reticent.

She was a loyal assistant. She's not an initiator. She was never a force for anything. ... She reflects the president's philosophy.

she is not good enough for the job.

No one thinks Canada is sending troops to Iraq.

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

It has opened up a lot of unhappiness that has accumulated over time. I don't know yet how serious the consequences will be.

Judges in the mould of Scalia and Thomas were the 'no new taxes' pledge of this presidency.

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

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.

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.

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.

One might almost say, to adapt von Clausewitz, that modern warfare is PR by other means. And war-winning strategies mean that modern armies most stop treating their communications operations as secondary assignments or (as still too often happens) dumping grounds for officers who have failed at everything else - but as missions absolutely essential to success.

The Soviet Union was brought down by a strange global coalition of Western European conservatives, Eastern European nationalists, Russian liberals, Chinese communists, and Afghan Islamic reactionaries, to name only a few. Many of these discordant groups disliked the United States intensely. But Americans were able to mobilize them to direct their ire at the Soviet Union first.

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.

[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,

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

A presidential speech is always the work of many hands.

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

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.

Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox

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?

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

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.

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.

There is no reason at all to believe either that she is a legal conservative or -- and more importantly -- that she has the spine and steel necessary to resist the pressures that constantly bend the American legal system toward the left.

What the generation, the Americans who came of age in the 30s and 40s believe they lived, felt, I mean had reason to feel they lived in a world that was very much beyond their control and in which terrible things were capable of happening to you beyond your control. The depression being the obvious example.

We have every reason to fear that the president's support among conservatives will decline. I don't think it will drop radically, but I think all the indicators are ... that conservatives are really unhappy about this. And if his numbers among conservatives go down, his overall ratings will drop. He's already at a dangerously low level.

Conservatives have worked too hard for too long to settle for anything less than our very best on the Supreme Court.

The talking point was 'Let's wait for the hearings because we don't know anything,' ... Well, I knew something. It was my responsibility. This was not fun. I take no pleasure in this. The long-term consequences for me are probably not going to be favorable.

Reagan is a symbol who calls the party to be something broader. The Republican Party is in many ways a very disunited party. In a way, by making Reagan a greater figure, you can create a greater unity.

Compared to, say, a prime minister of England, a president has actually astonishingly few legal powers. A prime minister of England can take England to war all by himself. He doesn't have to have a vote in Parliament, nothing. The President of the United States has to get a Declaration of War.

The Bush administration since 9/11 has been again and again fighting to escape gravity, fighting to escape the weight of the way things have always been done. Things are now coming to a decision point, and we'll know soon.

This moment calls for leadership from Republican senators who should go to the White House and tell it that this nomination will not work and should be withdrawn.

It wasn't that she didn't do the job right, ... but the way she did the job rules her out of being a person you would think of as capable of handling this enormous responsibility.

It's a funny story; it's not a self-aggrandizing one.

It's reaching out. But the Supreme Court is exactly the place where the president should draw the line.

I knew first-hand why, for all her virtues as a human being, she would be inadequate both ideologically and in terms of qualifications for this job.

I don't think there is a single member who thinks she deserves this nomination. And I don't think there is a single Republican who would be sorry if she were to withdraw.