Top 352 Quotes & Sayings by David Brooks

Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone.

People used to complain that selling a president was like selling a bar of soap. But when you buy soap, at least you get the soap. In this campaign you just get two guys telling you they really value cleanliness.

America is not just a democracy, it represents a certain culture of competitive mobility and personality aspirations, politics is not merely a clash of interests, but a clash of dreams.

When you cover politics, you realize that knowing how to talk about character matters more and more. The way we hold ideas is more important than the ideas.

What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.

To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.

People want reality that tells them how right they are all the time.

It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

How can we expect young people to be rooted in things such as character, morality and honesty? How is one supposed to be at once an arrow soaring skyward and an oak planted firmly in the ground? The meritocratic culture hones strivers on every aspect of their lives save one - how to cultivate character.

People who give money in large amount in politics are basically not altruistic.

I think the voters who voted for Donald Trump certainly are willing to tolerate a lot of ugliness, but maybe, if you're in desperate circumstances, or you think America is deeply in trouble, you're willing to tolerate that without necessarily liking it.

[Betsy DeVos] does care about charter schools, which are public schools. She does care about choice, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to care about. It's because it's the one issue where the Democratic donor base was really energized, which was the teacher unions.

We don't have the choice to control our emotions, but we do have the power to educate our emotions. And we do that through literature and through art and music to give ourselves a repertoire of emotional experiences.

Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure

It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?

I expect [Donald] Trump to do what he's done very successfully, which is, whether you like him or not, he will be the dominant player .

Hillary Clinton is still - she's such a private person.

If there is a series of attacks like that or, God forbid, if ISIS is really sending soldiers across Europe and maybe across the world for a barrage of these things, then the political climate is revolutionized here. And maybe the [Donald] Trump speech will look like a precursor to a climate that we're all about to walk into.

Live life as a series of revelations

The people who really have character make deep, unshakable connections to something outside themselves.

You have got to be loyal to people beneath you.

The politics is broken up and down. And Trump may emerge from a reality TV world that is much more powerful than we think. And there is the prospect that this is where we are, which is an horrific thought.

Donald Trump understands sense of belonging. And a lot of people think globalization, any time you make any particularity, you're sort of offending some other group. And a lot of people in this country think they belong to America anymore, and he at least appeals to some sense of belonging. I like the idea that we belong to Western traditions, so I'm glad he appeals to that sort of thing.

Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

Most poverty and suffering - whether in a country, a family or a person - flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it

Creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks... when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.

In my view, success is earned externally by being better than other people. But character, that sort of unfakeable goodness, is earned by being better than you used to be. And it's about self-confrontation.

We still are America though. We're still a country that is a country of social mobility. We're still a country of immigrants. We're still a country with common ancestors. And reviving the civics of America and the idea that we're going to be united, at least not right now, but in some common future, and talking in that hopeful way that Martin Luther King did, that Abraham Lincoln did, seems to me that's the way.

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

Bibi Netanyahu, froze the settlements and offered to go toward a two-state solution. The Palestinians didn't take him up on it. Historically, we have had a series of these offers. And the settlements themselves are not the keystone here. It seems to me myopic and bizarre that at the last moment, the Barack Obama administration would surrender the whole balanced array of policies that are obstacles to peace and focus on the one that is most detrimental to Israel.

Things that change history tend to be organized.

I think Americans expect optimism in their leadership. The most popular and effective leaders, whether it was Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or Jack Kennedy, brought to it a sense of optimism and possibility.

The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, 'The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.'

I could tell you that when you have trouble making up your mind about something, tell yourself you'll settle it by flipping a coin. But don't go by how the coin flips; go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails?

We have rapidly increasing technology, which is making life very good for people who are good at using words, and not so good for people who are not good at using words.

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

The message of the summoned life is that you don't need to panic if you don't yet know what you want to do with your life. But you probably want to throw yourselves into circumstances where the summons will come.

The effectiveness of a group of people is not determined by their IQ but by how well they communicate.

I can't imagine that being in the Trump Cabinet will be a very important job. I do think this will be a White House-run administration with a teeny-tiny group of people surrounding him, including his family maybe.

I wouldn't say philosophy and theology are dead. Brain science doesn't invent new philosophies but it helps remind us which of our existing philosophies are more true.

Your DVD collection is organized, and so is your walk-in closet. Your car is clean and vacuumed, your frequently dialed numbers are programmed into your cordless phone, your telephone plan is suited to your needs, and your various gizmos interact without conflict. Your spouse is athletic, your kids are bright, your job is rewarding, your promotions are inevitable, everywhere you need to be comes with its own accessible parking. You look great in casual slacks.

Russia has a very sophisticated, advanced attack on U.S. businesses and U.S. government and U.S. institutions. And it's not like Donald Trump is going to be walking away from this. He will be spending a lot of time on it, if he's any sort of normal president.

Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.

The point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts, it's to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.

Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being.

If you're running a successful administration, then you're loyal to people who are basically good who make a mistake. And that seems to be essential for any organization. And it should be essential if this were a normal administration, rather than a fiefdom, where everybody simply tries to give Donald Trump a good headline every day.

Our emotions tell us what to value. They're like a little GPS system: Go that way. Don't go that way.

Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully into their art, loved ones and commitments.

America has an important role to play as the world leader in creating a global order, free trade, free waterways, free commerce, free movement of people. That happens because of U.S. military might.

Empathy makes you more aware of other people's suffering, but it's not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.

Decision-making power, whether it's on foreign affairs or domestic affairs, is concentrated in the White House in a reasonably small circle.

The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

One of the things I think about with Donald Trump is what are his words actually attached to? With Trump, I'm not sure the words have roots. They are emanations of his psyche, but has he thought it through? Is there an argument, is there a policy implication?

Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It's not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it's deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

Pain now is better than pain deferred.