David Frum famous quotes

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

#Cutting #Years #Cost

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

#Taken #House #Age

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

#Fiction #Journalism #Shows

A presidential speech is always the work of many hands.
-- David Frum

#Hands #Presidential #Speech

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

#America #Vote

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

#People #Choices #Events

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

#Want #Frustrating

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

#Writing #Speech #Events

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

#Party #Support #Republican

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

#Decision #Leader #Conservative

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

#Country #Media #Two

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

#Country #Past #America

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

#Book #Thinking #Agency

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

#Mom #Cancer #Figures

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

#Honesty #Believe #Firsts

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

#History #Shapes #Facts

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

#Views #People #Want

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

#Technology #Media #Looks

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

#Character #Doors #Decision

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

#Country #United States #Mobility

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

#Government #Victim #Competing

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

#Country #Desperate #Economic

The elite isn't leading anymore. It's trapped.
-- David Frum

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.
-- David Frum

#People #World #Pay

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

#Names #Use #Individual

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

#Views #Campaigns #Donors

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

#Punishment #People #Needs

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

#Senior #Kings #Army

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.
-- David Frum

#Summer #Book #Wine

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

#Ideas #Who Cares #Want

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

#Entertainment #Conservative #Republican

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

#Betrayal #America #Legacy

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

#Thinking #Views #Tanks

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

#Thinking #Tanks #Position

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

#Moving #Unity #Republican

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

#Knowing #People #Important

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

#Vanity #People #Groups

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

#Strong #Party #Foxes

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

#Political #Opponents #Election

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

#Government #Usa #Iraq

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.
-- David Frum

#Fun #Ends #Should

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.
-- David Frum

#War #Fighting #History

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

#War #Fighting #History

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

#Foxes #Republican #Discovering

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.
-- David Frum

#Ideas #Roots #President

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

#People #Political #Watches

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.
-- David Frum

#Media #President #Events

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

#Mother #Conclusion

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.
-- David Frum

#Men #History #Historical

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.
-- David Frum

#Tyrants #Paris #History

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.
-- David Frum

#Cake #Two #Pieces

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.
-- David Frum

#Government #Years #Issues

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

#Self #Practice #Leader

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

#America #People #Wonderful

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

#War #Israel #Blood

[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

#War #Jail #Vietnam

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

#War #Iran #Elements

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.
-- David Frum

#War #Islamic #Names

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.
-- David Frum

#War #Communication #Mean

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

#Democracy #Balance #India