David Frum Quotes

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

Nations are liable to various revolutions in the state of their minds, and extent of their knowledge, as well as in their power and wealth ….

Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.

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.

Alfred Nobel believed that social changes are brought about slowly, and sometimes by indirect means.

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

The sudden political revolutions which strike the historian most forcibly are often the least important. The great revolutions are those of manners and thought. The true revolutions, those which transform the destinies of people, are most frequently accomplished so slowly that the historians can hardly point to their beginnings. Scientific revolutions are by far the most important.

You cannot just change regimes; you have to change mindsets.

People always overestimate how much will change in the next three years, and they underestimate how much will change over the next 10 years.

At the end of the day, films mirror our society. It will take time for everybody to open up to this and accept it. They are not instantly going to sit up and change the way they think about it.

America is a remarkable place in that social attitudes change almost imperceptibly, and then you wake up the next day and they've changed. But they've been changing all the time.

Haiti has changed a lot.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

We still have a lot of work to do in American culture. More open-mindedness is happening - in some cases rapidly, in some, slowly.

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

A cultural shift is not always an ideological one - or at least not always the one you imagine. Our norms are always evolving.

I want to initiate a change in society in the long term.

It's the need for change that drives us to join forces with our brothers and sisters all around the world - but change is slow.

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

The world is changing very profoundly.