Top 352 Quotes & Sayings by David Brooks - Page 2

The three people who are most often talked about with Hillary Clinton, whether it's Tim Kaine or Vilsack or Cory Booker, they are three extremely nice people.

I think the Barack Obama position and the majority position of American Jews and a lot of Americans is a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. Settlements get in the way of that. If they're not stopped soon, there is no prospect for that type of solution.

I would like to see an animating passion. Tim Kaine actually had a good line. What animated you before you got into politics? And she actually does have a story there to tell about children. And so drawing that animating passion will do good.

There is a virtue in shamelessness.

You have a country that is 20 percent liberal, 40 percent conservative. You have a country where maybe 22 percent have faith in government. If you're a liberal, it's just going to be tough. And you should just expect that. And it's tough for people on the right, too, because they don't get what they want either if you're, say, a libertarian. So, you have got the country sort of against you. And, nevertheless, you have a president.

I think the Republican budget priorities are messed up. I salute for the way they're attacking some of the entitlement programs, but they are taking huge cuts, by pretending they're just block-granting it to the states, out of Medicaid, from the least fortunate.

It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero

For the Democrats, they're trying to avoid having the Sanders-Clinton debate over and over again. But, to some degree, they're sentenced to that debate. Clinton is much more embracing of the global economy and the international world order. Sanders and Warren are much less so. And they have got to figure out which side the party is on, if they're going to have a clear message. I think this is probably one you probably can't straddle.

There was this famous clash of civilization thesis from Samuel Huntington, a political theorist. And the idea was that Western civilization is at war with Islam and maybe some of the other civilizations around the world. And I don't agree with that. But I do think there is such a thing as Western civilization. I think it starts with the Greeks and the Romans. Then it goes through the Enlightenment - or the Reformation, the Enlightenment. It goes through the scientific age. And it somewhat defines some of the cultures and mores of Europe and North America and some other countries.

We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

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

Emotion is the foundation of reason.

Fundamentalism is still on the march.

Memo to young journalists: Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope; Republican ones to rage.

Every White House I have covered since Reagan, when I got here, power has been more concentrated in the White House than the one before.

The moral foundation of the society, the way we interact with each other is more fundamental than the Supreme Court.

We know the 65-point policy points, to the extent that they exist, but is Hillary Clinton willing to be vulnerable, is she willing to be funny, is she willing to be both authoritative, but also real? And so less what she says than the emotional tone she sets. It takes a lot of confidence to be a vulnerable speaker on this stage. And sometimes she hasn't always projected the confidence it takes to be in some ways weak. But that's what I think people were looking for, that moment of human connection.

The prevailing view is that geniuses are largely built, not born.

I don't know if I'm sexist, though I have not paid much attention to the women's bracket.

I sort of feel we have to owe some respect to the process and owe some respect to the electorate and the people who voted Donald Trump, on the assumption that they have something to teach us.

If we are going to stop wars on this earth, we are going to have to make war on hunger our number one priority.

Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

We pretend to be a middle class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. ... We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before New England summer homes. How else can be explained the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year?

The crossroads where government meets enterprise can be an exciting crossroads. It can also be a corrupt crossroads. It requires moral rectitude to separate public service from private gain.

I agree with the idea of cutting [budget], but it should all be coming out of entitlements for the affluent and not out of domestic discretionary, which is welfare, education, all the stuff the government does, parks, FBI, and it shouldn't be coming out of Medicaid.

Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.

Plunder is morally wrong. It ruins your credibility.

Israel is a country of six million people. They need the U.S. It used to be bipartisan on Israeli politics. You never messed with that relationship. The fact that [ Benjamin] Netanyahu is willing to do that, I thought would horrify voters more than it turned out it did.

The ugliness can sometimes be super ugly, but also a warning sign of something down below.

What's sort of remarkable is that, especially in the Israel and the Russia cases, you have got a U.S. citizen, Donald Trump, siding with a foreign leader against the U.S. president. There is a reason why president-elects have tried to remain mute during their transitional periods, relatively, because you just don't want to be for somebody - some other country against your own government, and especially when you're about to take the helm of that government.

When you talk about the problem of illegal immigration, people are angry and polarized. When you talk about the answers, the debate gets a little different.

If you're cutting deals with one company or another, eventually, there's going to be a quid pro quo. There's going to be a bribe. There's going to be something.

Stairway to Wisdom”) David Brooks detailed the needed ingredients to gaining a deep understanding of a social problem, beginning with the data and moving on to first-hand accounts. The highest rung on his stairway, though, went beyond those: “Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe but to seek union—to think as another thinks and feel as another feels.

I think that it's an arguable position, whether with Hamas and ISIS around, whether there should be a Palestinian state, but it's a defensible position, given the current circumstances.

It's hard to imagine a party that is not corrupted by hatred.

We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.

The legitimacy of a war is not established by how it is organized but by what it achieves.

Donald Trump is sort of an Orwellian figure, an authoritarian figure who is twisting words in an Orwellian manner, "1984," to exercise power and control people's minds, or is he a 5-year-old who has an ego that needs to be fed, and the universe has to warp around his ego needs so he can feel good about himself, and everybody has to produce photos to make the monarch feel like he's made of gold.

People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles.

People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time.

Donald Trump is so egregious in the way he talks about women, the way he allegedly treated women.

[Betsy DeVos] is quite a smart person, capable, pretty sophisticated in subtle thought. And so to me, that puts her in the realm of policy. But we're in a climate where, as today, she tries to visit a school, and she can't even do that because protesters are blocking that.

Putin's an egomaniac, so there are two ways he can process his ego mania. He can say, "Oh, I stood up to the U.S.," or, "Hey, I'm essential to the world order."

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive.

Barack Obama won such a big electoral mandate because a lot of people thought he was - transcended partisan and ideological barriers and was going to put aside the old debates. So, he was able to get a lot of moderates and a lot of independents.

I've come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks.

There are plenty of team players in government who do whatever the leader says. There are too few difficult members, who have complicated minds, unusual perspectives, the toughness to withstand the party-line barrages and a practical interest in producing results.

... trash talk ... Washington floats on a river of aspersion.

Through American history, we have had populist movements that often, often, often have this ugly racial element. But, often, there are warning signs of some deeper social and economic problem.

The more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them.

Charter schools are public schools. They're paid for publicly and they're part of the public system. They just have a more independent structure.

If done correctly, these techniques can allow the Bobo pilgrim to have 6 unforgettable moments a morning, 2 rapturous experiences over lunch, 1,5 profound insights in the afternoon (on average), and .667 life-altering epiphanies after each sunset.

Donald Trump has a pre-modern monarchic family structure. His business is a monarchy with family members all around. His administration is a monarchy with family members all around.

Bill Clinton pandered by telling you what you wanted to hear. John Kerry panders by never telling you what you don't want to hear. This is negative pandering; he talks a lot without really ruling anything out so you can draw your own conclusions.....Kerry has been talking for years, and yet such is the thicket of his verbiage that he has achieved almost complete strategic ambiguity.

If we got rid of everybody in Washington who sold access for donations, then the town would be empty. But it's unseemly.

The technology's going to change, but what people want to read is going to be basically the same.

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.

What you hear in focus groups and conversations, people will give you 20 minutes of rage about how the borders are out of control. But then you start saying, practically, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about the 11 million here? What are we going to do to get some workers we need for the farms? Then people start having a normal conversation.

Economists sometimes do try to reduce behavior to law-like predictability. But people respond differently to different primes, to different contexts even from one moment to the next. We possess multiple selves that are aroused by different circumstances.

It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.