104+ David Frum Quotes On Democracy, Government And Politics

David Frum is an American Public Servant who is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic and a CNN contributor. He is also the author of nine books, including the best-selling "Dead Right" and "Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic." Following is our collection on famous quotes by David Frum on democracy, government, politics.

Top 10 David Frum Quotes

1. Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.
2. 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.
3. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don't usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.
4. Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents.
5. Journalists have to do their job. And journalists have to resist emotionalism. You have to keep your cool and to continue to do your job until you're prevented.
6. Canada has a real civil service, which the United States doesn't have, an independent civil service. Canada also has a stronger federal system.
7. While there is an attempt by the Trump people to say that California isn't really America. California certainly seems like America to me.
8. So long as Donald Trump is powerful and popular, Fox News is going to achieve an advertising bonanza unheard of in the era of modern cable, because people will pay them to talk to the president.
9. I am not a person of the left. But one of the things, the central idea of democracy is that you have a bigger investment in the system as a whole than you do in any particular outcome.
10. Democracy is not about protests. Democracy is about meetings.

David Frum Short Quotes

• The elite isn't leading anymore. It's trapped.
• Think tanks do have points of view, and they are absolutely entitled to defend them.
• There is no right to work in a think tank, and these are very privileged positions.
• 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.
• People need to understand that in Washington, the process is the punishment.
• Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.
• I don't think that disasters have to be spectacular. They can be a slow corrosion.
• Donald Trump doesn't believe in much, doesn't want to do much.
• In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

David Frum Quotes About Democracy

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. — David Frum

Venezuela has gone from being a democratic country 15 years ago to being totally not a democracy today. Usually that de-democratization doesn't take the form of a heavy handed police state. — David Frum

Americans are about to discover that their system is more vulnerable than they thought. There's a lot of complacency in American politics, there's a lot of complacency in advanced democracies generally. — David Frum

So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them. — David Frum

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

David Frum Quotes About Government

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

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. — David Frum

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

Donald Trump has declared that he's going to divest himself from his companies and that his sons will be separated from the government. But his sons who run the company are regularly attending his meetings with senators, making it clear to everybody, you want access to Trump you pay. — David Frum

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

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

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

David Frum Quotes About Politics

One of the things that really has gone wrong in modern politics, one of the things that made Trump possible was that many people have a view of politics as something dramatic and exciting and thrilling and emotional. — David Frum

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

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

[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

David Frum Quotes About Media

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

In America, you will see in area after area, media under pressure, businesses under pressure not to criticize Donald Trump lest he reduce their stock value with an angry tweet. — David Frum

We all work for media, we all make mistakes all the time. That's inevitable. What the difference between a responsible journalistic institution is, does it care whether it makes mistakes or not? And does it correct them? — David Frum

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). — David Frum

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

David Frum Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — David Frum

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

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

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

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

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

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. — David Frum

Trump is not just unlike a Republican, he's unlike a presidential candidate. The whole elaborate presidential process is designed to screen out people like Donald Trump. And that process broke down in ways quite unlike anything in the recent experience of the United States. — David Frum

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

One of the things we're all going to have to discover, establishment is just an abusive term for institutions. It's institutions that keep us free. — David Frum

I do think Hillary Clinton, I mean the Clintons, I`ve got a lot of critiques of the Clinton foundation. I do think they bend the law. But Hillary Clinton accepts the concept of legality, she accepts that courts are supreme, laws must be complied with and the power of the state is not to be used for persona revenge or personal enrichment. And that`s something - not something I trust Donald Trump to do. — David Frum

Donald Trump is not supposed to save jobs one by one. He's supposed to build a sound macro economy in which private enterprises create jobs. — David Frum

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. — David Frum

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

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

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

Donald Trump, as a businessman, he's not much of a builder and he's not much of dealmaker and he certainly isn't very good at making expenses line up with income. But he is a marketing genius. He must have seen an empty market niche that no one but him filled. — David Frum

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

Donald Trump is behaving in an extremely provocative way toward China, having first cancelled the TPP and alienated America's friends in the region. Same thing that he's authorizing much riskier gambits against ISIS, having alienated many of America's allies and friends in the region. — David Frum

One of the things you can learn from a figure like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is that if you take all the resources of the state for yourself, you don't build much of a constituency and you have to rely on repression, and repression is difficult in the modern world. — David Frum

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

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. — David Frum

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

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

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

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

I have a range of scenarios. One of them is a chaos, that what could happen is Congress does step up a little bit and the administration is paralyzed. And we go through all kinds of constitutional crises, impeachment or the 25th Amendment removal process. Another frightening scenario is Donald Trump is steering his way to a series of international confrontations at the same time as he's appeasing Russia. — David Frum

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

Donald Trump's big goal is to become the richest man in the world, abusing the powers of the presidency. — David Frum

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

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

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. — David Frum

Democracy requires you to learn how to lose as well as how to exercise power when you win. And that requires restraint all around. One of the reasons it works is because when you win you don't do things that are so upsetting to the losers that they feel like they have less, they have more to gain by turning over the system. — David Frum

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

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

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. — David Frum

I think the single most important question is how do you maximize the number of children who grow up in stable two-parent households. We know in all kinds of ways it makes a huge difference to how kids come out and we are hardening into a caste society where some kids do better in all kinds of ways because they have two parents and others don't. — David Frum

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. — David Frum

It's very important to understand that 21st century authoritarian rule does not look like 20th century authoritarian rule. You're not going to have people in parade ground formations. You're not going to have a police state. You're not going to people with decorative armbands bullying people on the sidewalks. And the leaders won't stand at microphones for hours ranting at people. All of that is so 80 years ago. — David Frum

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

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. — David Frum

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. — David Frum

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

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

The system has evolved to protect parties from people like Donald Trump. It really is true that people without well-established public records, without proven capability in public service, without tested beliefs and at least apparently under the influence of a foreign power, such people are screened out by major parties. — David Frum

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the questions I often get asked is, "Were you surprised that Trump won?" I always answer the same way: "I was surprised, I am surprised and I will never stop being surprised." — David Frum

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

The system we have is one that protects my rights under a president I don`t approve. That tomorrow we`ll do the same for you. And what people have in common is their commitment to those shared rules. And if you have someone who was a challenger to the shared rules, that`s unacceptable. And we`ve never seen that before. Not in a long, long time but we see it now. — David Frum

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

I want people to understand that, look, we're in a period of democratic deficit, democratic recession. There are fewer democracies in the world today than in 2005, and in many of the countries that are still technically democracies, we're seeing a reduction in the rule of law. And that's especially true in Central Europe, but it's also true of places like South Africa, the Philippines. — David Frum

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. — David Frum

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

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. — David Frum

The habit of going to your congressman's town hall and asking questions, that's powerful in a way that shouting slogans or getting arrested is not, that is completely counterproductive. — David Frum

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

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

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

Life Lessons by David Frum

1. David Frum's life serves as an example of the importance of staying true to your values and beliefs, no matter the cost. He was willing to take a stand against his own party and speak up for what he believed in.
2. He also taught us that it is important to be open to learning and growing, as he changed his views on certain issues throughout his career.
3. Lastly, he showed us the power of resilience and dedication, as he kept fighting for what he believed in despite the criticism he faced.