Explore Quotes by David Frum

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

A presidential speech is always the work of many hands.