Top 352 Quotes & Sayings by David Brooks - Page 4

Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascinating figure.We say Nixonian about a lot of people. He really is Nixonian. He's brilliant. He's very isolated and insular.

Most poor people in America are white. The family breakdown issue is an issue that crosses all sorts of racial lines. High school dropout issues. But because of the flow of events which involve the racial component, we've sometimes confused racial issues with other issues which are trans-racial.

We are all fundamentally equal souls, and if you make a zillion dollars, you're not any better than anybody else spiritually. You're still an equal soul.

That is the job of the Catholic Church, to be a balance to the materialistic drives of our culture and of economy.

The gun becomes this psychological totem, this thing of who I am. And it's almost as if using the gun is going to be the thing that's going to be my expression of how I make a difference in the world.

Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don't see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that's a great thing to build upon.

One of the things capitalism does is, it does enhance and exacerbate the sin of pride, making yourself, the material world the center of your universe, instead of God's will.

The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That's the natural genetic reaction.

If Donald Trump is just tweeting about a union guy, then he's just being the bully we have seen. But if he uses the power of the presidency to back up some of those tweets and he's really, really coming down with a hammer on people he doesn't like using the power of the presidency, then we're seeing something very new and very different.

If you grow up in a home where actions don't lead to predictable consequences, you don't develop strategies to control your impulses.

If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa.

I want to make big films. That's always been my ambition.

Politics really is a team sport. You really have to work the whole system to get somewhere down the road.

We have the choice to choose how we're going to educate our emotions.

I think there are two basic approaches you can use for campaign finance. One is complete openness, everybody knows absolutely everything, but no limits. But you let people decide.The other is just have a national public system.

Clearly, politics is a team sport. Trump is not so much of a team player.

It's impossible for one person to think of everything.

When you're running for president, you're a guest in the living room for four years. And if people don't think you're going to be around the living room as a pleasant experience, they're not going to vote for you even if they agree with you.

I'm a pundit. I'm, like, paid to be a narcissistic blowhard and be in front of the camera.

I learned I'm not a science writer. I'm not very good at describing how something is happening. I try to describe "So What?"

Since 2005, a majority of Americans, according to the Gallup poll, have said it was wrong and a mistake to go into Iraq.

I don't think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.

I wasn't born with a tie or with Mark Shields stapled to my left hip. I have another life.

It's a completely irrational decision to drop out of school.

The drugs are just growing all around the country, and so, it all feeds into problems that are not just urban, but are just spread throughout the country.

Sometimes, you go - you achieve a few things in life. I have achieved more career success than I ever experienced or that I ever thought. And I just realized, it doesn't make you happy. It's an elemental truth. It's so true.

I want to try to make big films that hopefully connect with people.

A heroic moral victory for the New York Mets. It may be the only kind of victory we're achieving this season, but he set a good example for professional athletes and the rest of us.

Trade agreements are a net benefit for the world, and a net benefit for our foreign policy, and in the long run, given the dislocations, are a net benefit for us, too.

When your institution is under threat, you feel you have a lot of hostility, you feel things are slipping away, you have got internal problems, there's a tendency to turn inward and to focus on yourselves.

I do think British and American politics rhyme. They go in cycles. They go in Thatcher-Reagan cycles, Blair-Clinton cycles.

People who give money in large amount in politics are basically not altruistic. They have some issue. They have some interest. It may be world peace. It may be preserving carried interest. But it's not altruistic.

We have an international system. We all profit from it. Trade profits from it. Peace. We can travel around the world because of it. And part of that system is certain ideas, the certain ideas you can't invade other countries for no reason. You can't commit genocide. You can't - rogue regimes can't have nuclear weapons, and you can't gas your own people.

I'm not a kicker and a screamer.

As a director, I like trying to unlock the subtext of the scene and try to put the camera in a place that helps that.

I came to the conclusion is that we have a very shallow view of human nature in the policy world. We're really good at talking about material things, really bad at talking about emotions, really good at stuff we can count, really bad at the deeper stuff that actually drives behavior.

I'm not the most emotionally attuned guy in the world. My wife says that me writing about emotion is like Gandhi writing about gluttony.

Some people think humility is thinking lowly of yourself. Some people think it's not thinking about yourself. But, to me, the best definition of humility is radical self-awareness from a distance, seeing themselves from a distance and saying, what's my problem?

If you're a soldier or marine in an Arab country, Islam is the solution. And you need to show respect.

When your institution is under assault, you're feeling like the weight is on it and the history might be flowing away, don't turn inward, go outward.

Some children lack tools to see their course in the world in far-sighted ways. Just introducing school vouchers won't change that. You have to have nurse-home partnerships, early childhood education, mentoring programs and so on. People learn from people they love.

If you know that most processing is below the level of awareness, you learn the value of sleep. You're brain is working on the problem anyway.

There are no free and democratic and wealthy countries in the world that have US rate of gun violence. We have to worry about loners and alienated people. We have to do better on mental health.

I take a benign view of digital connectedness. I notice in most young people's lives, Facebook and such doesn't replace normal dating or hanging out, it just facilitates it.

I'm thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.

If I had to fault President [Barack] Obama, I would say that sometimes governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization.

The brain writes the autobiography of our species at the conscious level.

I think the presidency is a bad way to measure the effective campaign finance, because in the presidency, there is so much publicity, there's so much money floating around.

I do think trying to live each day as a bunch of moral occasions, did I live up to what I would hope, and, if I didn't, what can I do tomorrow to be a little better, I do think we can improve. We get better at life as we get older.

The madman theory is that you can be a successful deterrer if you - if they think you could be crazy. And so I think it can be very effective, so long as you're not actually crazy.

I was really fortunate that I went to a high school where we actually had a film theory program.

Nonetheless, so whether it's unconstitutional or not [for judges to overruling presidents], I leave to others.

One of the frustrations about the modern world is that we don't even have a good vocabulary to describe our state. The word sentiment sounds mushy. [...] Sentiment is not mushy.

It's just a lot safer to be an incumbent. So I think they have used the campaign finance reforms. They have passed laws that will help themselves stay in office. And I think that's one of the flaws that we do have in the system.

When you're running for president you have to take some risks and you've got to show people something fresh and you've got to stay interesting.

There has never been evidence that people from these [banned] countries are disproportionately likely to commit terrorist acts. We have sent chaos to the airports. We have offended the world. We have derailed the administration. We have done it in such an incompetent way, the administration has, that people with perfectly legal residence have been widely inconvenienced.

President Obama was the first president not to abide by the limits in the general election.

It's almost inherent, but I'm a massive Stanley Kubrick fan. I'm a big admirer of what guys like Christopher Nolan have been able to do. For me, to be able to try to make big films that reach a lot of people, and that hopefully have something to say, is a lofty goal, but that's my goal.

People tend to marry people with similar-width noses, eyes similarly apart, with complementary immune systems.

No matter where you are on politics, I think it is wonderful to see candidates funding campaigns not by talking to a very small number of very rich people, but by reaching out to a very large number of citizens.