David Frum Quotes
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Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.
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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.
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Today's Republican party is too beholden to factions generally.
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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.
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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.
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When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won't do.
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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.
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Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.
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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.
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In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.
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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.
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My view on candidates on money is unless it's proven that the donor stole the money, the campaign keeps the money.
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The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.
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Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.
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Look, the media are trapped by changes in the technology and business of their industry.
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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.
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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.
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I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated.
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People need to understand that in Washington, the process is the punishment.
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Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents.
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Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox.
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People who watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events.
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We, as conservative intellectuals, should not be in the business of making excuses for bad parliamentary decisions by Republican leaders in Congress.
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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.