Top 126 Quotes & Sayings by David Frum

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

A presidential speech is always the work of many hands.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

You can have these fake engagements, these virtual engagements that substitute for actual engagements. You don't have to participate, you can hit a button, send you 200 dollars to the Barack Obama for President campaign and think it's like you knocked on a door. But you didn't knock on a door.

Civil unrest, civil turmoil is not a challenge to President Trump. It's a resource for him. He needs to create an image of a polarized country in which the people who are against him are somehow alien or anti-system.

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.

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.

No one is murdered in Hungary and there are no illegal arrests, but people have begun again, when they talk to you in a public place looking around to see who's listening. You see that in Slovakia, you're beginning to see that in Poland.

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

The Canadian middle class is under less pressure than any other middle class in any developed country on the planet. So they feel good. They feel optimistic. They feel secure.

Modern authoritarianism, as it's growing inside Europe and now coming to the United States, rests much more on the use of power to protect the guilty than to persecute the innocent. And its motive is not crazy totalitarian utopianism, it's motive is repressive kleptocracy. To steal and to use the powers of the state to protect theft.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.