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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
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David Frum
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: June 30
Blogger
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Speechwriter
City of Toronto
David Jeffrey Frum
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Americans
Democracy
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Democracies
Politics
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Generally
More quotes by David Frum
Canada has a real civil service, which the United States doesn't have, an independent civil service. Canada also has a stronger federal system.
David Frum
Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.
David Frum
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
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
What I say is I am somebody who cares about conservative ideas. I want to see them implemented in governance.
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
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
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
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
In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.
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
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
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
As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.
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
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
Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents.
David Frum
Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.
David Frum
People who watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events.
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
