David Brooks Quotes

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?

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

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.

My SUV, assuming Hummer comes out with a model for those who find the current ones too cramped, will look something like the Louisiana Superdome on wheels. It'll guzzle so much gas as I walk out to my driveway there will be squads of Saudi princes gaping and applauding. It'll come, when I buy it, with little Hondas and Mazdas already embedded in the front grillwork.

I do think economic and social anxiety is the number one issue. And I'm pretty confident Hillary Clinton will be really riding that train pretty hard.

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

With a normal president like President [Barack] Obama, he says a word, and that's because there has been some thought that he's done and there had been policy papers and there's been aides and there's been advisers and then there is a connection to an actual set of policies. And so, the words like have roots into actual stuff.

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.

I think as we interpret him and frankly as the world learns to interpret Donald Trump, are these just words that are enigmatic things floating on air or are they actually shifts in policy and will they change moment by moment, day by day without any underlying connection to the actual stuff of governance? I don't know.

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.

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

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

It's very hard to find an evangelical person under 45, let alone on some of the Christian college campuses, who has any tolerance for Donald Trump.

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.

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.

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?

We live in a culture of a big me. We're encouraged - we raise our kids to think how great they are, where we have to market ourselves to get through life. We're in social media, where we broadcast highlight - highlight reels of our own lives on Facebook.

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.

The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it's not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It's not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It's not nearly as big a problem as the nation's stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

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

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.

Fundamentalism is still on the march.

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.

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.

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

It's part of Donald Trump's psychodynamics to always care about his press coverage intensely. He's more interested in that than anything else.

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.

I certainly hear a lot of people say that Donald Trump not only incited some bad things. He also exposed some things. He exposed pain in America that a lot of us didn't have the full extent of, some of the divisions and chasms in the country.

Jim Stavridis is the former NATO commander who is sometimes on people's lists, also very plausible, self-possessed, someone with sobriety.

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

If you thought Donald Trump was going to be swallowed up by the conventional Republican Party or by Washington, you were wrong.

It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

There certainly is a pattern of administrations that have good transitions, George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and administrations that have really bad transitions, I would say Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. I would say this is beginning to look like a bad transition, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump as they begin to argue even at the presidential level, which is more or less unprecedented.

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.

On the larger issue of the travel ban, our friend Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post I think put it pretty well. I'm not sure it's illegal, but it's extremely stupid.

Labor-rich manufacturing doesn't exist anymore. Manufacturing jobs are white-collar, Silicon Valley programmers or highly-skilled technicians. They are not going to employ lots of people.

I am not a Jew for Jesus but I am definitely a Jew for Christmas. Christmas is one of the best things you Christians have given us, along with mac and cheese, Bono, croquet and politeness.

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.

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.

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.

I have seen [Betsy DeVos] present a few times. I don't really know her. But I have seen her present on education policy, and she's not a stupid person.

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.

When you get a big crisis, everyone wants somebody with some experience and some credibility.

I'm beginning to think [Ted] Cruz had a good convention, that if [Donald] Trump goes down, Cruz is pretty well positioned to be the Republican major figure in four, six or even within two years.

The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends. The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting. Eat more. Commute less.

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.

It's hard for parents just to measure schools.

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.