Top 352 Quotes & Sayings by David Brooks - Page 6

I really think of [Donald] Trump erratic. I think that was the big message that came out. The positive agenda for Hillary [Clinton] was a little less vibrant.

It's important for presidents to emotionally connect, with the country in times of crisis, but also with people in Washington. If you can't emotionally connect - and [Barack] Obama is not the greatest, but he can at least do it - then people won't be with you when the times are hard.

[Mitch Daniels] was not a bad governor. He could be playful, but - or communicator.I'm just saying it will - I think will be - every candidate comes into the White House, assuming if [Hillary Clinton] wins, or if she does win, with strengths and weaknesses. This will be a weakness, because this was such an easy moment to show some heart.

There will just always be a distance between you and the people around you. Now, [Hillary Clinton] can clearly emotionally connect with her intimates within the zone of trust. It's just the wall outside the zone of trust is so impermeable.

If we're in some sort of Hobbesian state of nature, where you just want a strong man who has no compassion Donald Trump is going to do a little better. So, we will figure out what game we're playing.

Of those two [Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump], I do think that the - right now, at least in my mind, the Democratic theme is eclipsing the Republican one.

I think Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana was a case of that, who was an outstanding administrator.

[Donald Trump] will be the one on offense. He will be the one serving volleys, and it may be some weird stuff about the Russians, but he will be controlling things a little more than he probably did over the last two weeks.

For the Republican Convention, I think of Trump's speech and sort of the darkness, the fear of crime, the need for a strong arm really, and so that one core theme.

What's interesting about the Trump administration is how bitterly divided they are in their attitudes towards Putin.

When you're in governance, you understand the limitations and the complexities of governance.

If I were Donald Trump, I would definitely not pick Mitt Romney because it's very easy for Mitt Romney to have have a separate foreign policy operatus in the State Department that would run a dissenting foreign policy from the White House foreign policy. There, I think the populist America-first foreign policy of Donald Trump does run against a potential rival.

If you go in a confirmation process, you're going to be asked about the embarrassing or stupid things you said. You should have a view.

Putin is someone who has been undermining the norms of what we consider the world order since he got into power and in increasing success.

The policies of the Democratic Party have always been in cultural consonance with the culture of the working class. And, somehow, they missed that.

I have come to think we have to treat Donald Trump's tweets like Snapchat. It's just something that is going to go away. And it flies out of some region of his brain and it goes out into the ether. And usually it's on the realm of media.

I'm of course nostalgic for Barack Obama all of a sudden.

Populists love rich people. They just hate professionals.

I do think creating an open free-trade economy but with strong social support is the way to go.

It's rare in an administration for a secretary of state and a secretary of defense to get along really well.

The Republicans in Congress, they believe in Ronald Reagan's Republican Party, not Donald Trump Republican Party or Steve Bannon's Republican Party.

The Republican Party has become an ethnic nationalist party.

The idea that a big country is going to go out and send troops into some country to take their resources, and then the rest of the world is going to somehow trust us is just a ridiculous notion.

Obamacare is woven into the fabric of health care. It's very hard to just rip it out, as Donald Trump sort of acknowledged with The Wall Street Journal.

I think, from a progressive point of view, to have a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House, and to have spent the time on Obamacare, which had real benefits, 20 million insured, but not on inequality, was a major cost to the Democratic Party, costing them their majorities, but also a bit of a cost to the country, because it didn't address the fundamental issues that led to Donald Trump and that led to a lot of unhappiness, just the continued widening inequality.

Donald Trump didn't emerge from the orthodoxy of the Republican Party. And so there's going to be bigger differences than normal.

Woe to you who insults the intelligence community, if you're president.

The government is supposed to provide a level playing field where people can compete fairly. It's not supposed to cut deals with one company or another to do so.

Putin has been - and with a lot of the groups, the conservative groups, the more extreme conservative groups that underlie Trump, he's a bit of a hero because he speaks for traditional values, he's against the global institutions.

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen seem to have no respect for the institutions that were created after World War II, and they see a potential alliance of populists around the world who would fight Islam and restore a certain semblance of traditional values.

Just, as I have traveled around from school to school, whether it's project-based learning or an outward bound curriculum, it's very hard to tell the difference between charters and public anymore. There's no fine line.

Mitt Romney knows a lot. He's a very professional - a consummate professional.

I think charter schools, choice, and frankly school standards need a champion.

Personally, I think Mitt Romney would be a great secretary of state.

Populists hate journalists, they hate teachers, they hate lawyers, but they tend to like rich people. There's something deeply consistent.

I think Donald Trump is going to find it very hard to do the kind of massive change he wants.

I think Barack Obama's foreign policy will be regarded more failure than success.

I think Trump's attention span is super low. I don't think he has the expertise to actually run a foreign policy.

The corruption will come back to haunt the Trump administration. But mostly, it'll come back to haunt the American economy, as companies decide they can make money by rent-seeking, by getting money from government rather than earning it the old-fashioned way.

Donald Trump is this whirling dervish of chaos. He picked a fight with Mexico. Germany is not far behind. He will pick a fight with them. He will pick a fight with China, which would be truly cataclysmic.

The thing that should most concern us is a shift in American foreign policy. We have had a bipartisan belief in American foreign policy based on the post-World War II institutions that believed in democratic global world, which Russia and the Soviet Union was often seen as hostile to. And most Republicans and Democrats have always basically believed in this world order. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and maybe Marine Le Pen do not agree with this basic structure of the world.

You have to have a plan, or else you're just creating a recipe for chaos.

When a president speaks that usually means a lot.

You have got to have two things in education reform. You have got to have some flexibility, so people can figure out what to do. But you also have to have accountable, basically what the Common Core standards were, some sort of set of national standards, so we can measure.

We're no longer living in Tammany Hall America.

Donald Trump's got to do some big changes, because what he was voted on. But when you think about how to do it, it would take massive expertise, which his people, believe me, do not have.

I just think, realistically, there's a lot of room outside the Trump populist right and the Bernie-Sanders-Elizabeth-Warren populist left. There are a lot of us who believe in open trade, open borders, a dynamic forward-looking economy, not a nostalgic economy, but do want to provide a significant level of social service or sort of economic Milton Friedman foreign policy, Ronald Reagan domestic policy, Franklin Roosevelt. And there's a lot of room in the center.

Donald Trump's ego is like a comet the size of Jupiter just traveling through the solar system, and we all have to be affected by its gravitational pull.

It's hard for parents just to measure schools.

Donald Trump just needs the ego fed all the time.

I think Romney's foreign policy is sensible.

The idea that Russia felt emboldened and apparently fearless to go into our election and manipulate our own election process, whether successfully or not, is a sign that they are outside the norms of normal society.