Top 60 David Frum Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.”

— David Frum

2. “If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.”

— David Frum

3. “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

4. “People need to understand that in Washington, the process is the punishment.”

— David Frum

5. “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

6. “When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels,” tweeted the sharp social observer Siyanda Mohutsiwa the morning after the 2016 election.”

— David Frum

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

— David Frum

8. “Democracy is a work in progress. So is democracy’s undoing.”

— David Frum

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.”

— David Frum

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

— David Frum

14. “People who watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events.”

— David Frum

15. “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

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

— David Frum

17. “Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.”

— David Frum

18. “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

19. “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

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

— David Frum

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21. “The five million people who watch cable news are the political nation, the people who really care.”

— David Frum

22. “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

23. “The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”

— David Frum

24. “Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse.”

— David Frum

25. “A presidential speech is always the work of many hands.”

— David Frum

26. “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

27. “Why should we not expect self-designated environmental leaders to practice what they preach?”

— David Frum

28. “We, as conservative intellectuals, should not be in the business of making excuses for bad parliamentary decisions by Republican leaders in Congress.”

— David Frum

29. “Look, the media are trapped by changes in the technology and business of their industry.”

— David Frum

30. “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

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31. “The one-third of America that identifies as “conservative” will be isolated even more profoundly within an information ghetto of deception and incitement.”

— David Frum

32. “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

33. “What I say is I am somebody who cares about conservative ideas. I want to see them implemented in governance.”

— David Frum

34. “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.”

— David Frum

35. “Power creates temptations, and that is true even for the smallest increments of power: the power of the building inspector, of the customs official, of the cop at the traffic stop. It took a lot of work by a lot of people over a long time to build even America’s highly imperfect standards of public integrity. Undoing that work would be a far easier task. Corruption is the resting state of pubic affairs; integrity a painstaking, unceasing struggle against cultural inertia and political gravity.”

— David Frum

36. “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

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

— David Frum

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

— David Frum

39. “The elite isn’t leading anymore. It’s trapped.”

— David Frum

40. “One can shape history as much through the facts one omits as through the facts one includes.”

— David Frum

41. “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”

— David Frum

42. “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

43. “There is no right to work in a think tank, and these are very privileged positions.”

— David Frum

44. “Trump is the producer, writer, and star of an extravaganza performance of the theater of resentment.”

— David Frum

45. “The Republican Party was built on a coalition of the nation’s biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers. The winners wrote the policy; the losers provided the votes.”

— David Frum

46. “The Republican Party was built on a coalition of the nation’s biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers.”

— David Frum

47. “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

48. “Whenever you discuss politics, it is always better to use individual names rather then the term neocon.”

— David Frum

49. “Events don’t happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen.”

— David Frum

50. “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