Top 126 Quotes & Sayings by David Frum - Page 3

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

President Trump watches a lot of television. I mean, really a lot. His favourite channel is Fox. Now just imagine somebody wants put a message in front of the president. You can hire a lobbyist or you can buy a minute on Fox or you can even pay somebody at a think tank to articulate your message and then pay a booker at that think tank to get that person on Fox and put the thought directly in the president's ear.

That is the way successful countries, and Canada has been one of the most successful countries over the past quarter century, they operate. That when you win, you win within limits, when you lose, you accept the outcome.

When we talk about authoritarianism, we conjure up out-of-date visions from the 1930s.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.

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.

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.