Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

David Frum
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: June 30
Blogger
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Speechwriter
City of Toronto
David Jeffrey Frum
Way
Towns
Counterproductive
Questions
Congressman
Asking
Slogans
Habit
Shouting
Completely
Arrested
Powerful
Hall
Getting
Halls
Going
Town

More quotes by David Frum

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.
David Frum
Image
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
Image
[In politics,] when there is no reason to speak, there is a reason not to speak.
David Frum
Image
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
Image
Donald Trump doesn't believe in much, doesn't want to do much.
David Frum
Image
The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.
David Frum
Image
As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.
David Frum
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
People who watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events.
David Frum
Image
Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.
David Frum
Image
Look, the media are trapped by changes in the technology and business of their industry.
David Frum
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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