David Frum

“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.”

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

“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.”

“If right and left are competing to be the biggest victim, who is competing to be the government?”

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

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

“Today's Republican party is too beholden to factions generally.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.”

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

“Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox.”

“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.”