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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

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David Frum
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: June 30
Blogger
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Speechwriter
City of Toronto
David Jeffrey Frum
Things
Democracy
Never
Written
President
Makes
Littles
Occurs
Little
Minister
Work
Ministers
Much
Prime

More quotes by David Frum

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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
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Look, the media are trapped by changes in the technology and business of their industry.
David Frum
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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.
David Frum
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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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
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Donald Trump doesn't believe in much, doesn't want to do much.
David Frum
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Democracy is not about protests. Democracy is about meetings.
David Frum
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.
David Frum
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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
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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
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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