128 Quotes by David Frum

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.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

No president in history has burned more public money to sustain his personal lifestyle than Donald Trump. Three-quarters of the way through his first year in office, President Trump was on track to spend more on travel in one year of his presidency than Barack Obama in eight -- even though Trump only rarely ventured west of the Mississippi or across any ocean.

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.

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.

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

Democracy is a work in progress. So is democracy's undoing.

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

The ceiling in the mess was very low, not even eight feet. You can feel the weight of the West Wing above your head, and with the the weight of American memory.