David Brooks Quotes

There is the English language and then there's the Trump language.

There is a virtue in shamelessness.

Certainly, the country can't have two presidents at once, so the tradition has been to hang back if you're the president-elect and wait for your time in office. [Donald] Trump is not a hang-back kind of guy.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Russian hackers interfered in our elections, and we like penalized a few of them. Whatever they're doing underground, we don't know. No, this is going to be a big issue. And I have to say the Barack Obama - the Donald Trump position is, A, mystifying, but, B, doomed. He has a nice little Vladimir Putin romance going on right now. I think we're going to get out the hankies, because this is going to turn into an ugly relationship within a year or two.

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.

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

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

Betsy DeVos is not the most informed person on education policy, but I have seen her present a few times, and she presents as a pretty respectable, intelligent person who has cared passionately about education and cares about charter schools.

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

Populists love rich people. They just hate professionals.

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

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

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

It's the rising tide of enmity in the country, Donald Trump attacking judges, Donald Trump attacking John McCain, Senator [Richard] Blumenthal, the town halls, the riots in Berkeley. You have got the incivility on the floor of the United States Senate. You have got just a rising tide, every single story.

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.

Bragging about what a good deal you got is one of the many great art forms that my people, the Jews, have introduced to American culture.

When a president speaks that usually means a lot.

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

This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making , a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue. Living is an inherently emotional business.

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

Our system is not only based on rules, but a series of self-restraints that we won't be as barbaric as we could be in competing for power because we know if we're all barbaric as we could be, the whole country and the whole society falls apart.

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.

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.

Even in this nuclear thing, [ Donald Trump] says we should be stronger and expand. What does that mean? So, what is concrete in what he's saying?

With the case of [Mike] Pence, giving a little aurora of likability to a candidate, a lead candidate who's a little lacking in that department.

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.

The party cannot be competitive nationally unless it's competitive in California, Oregon, Washington, New England, Pennsylvania, along the coasts. And the problem for the party is, you can't get there from here. You can't start out where the current Republicans are and win back those places. To me, what you have to do is create a different Republican Party that can win in those places.

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

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

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

[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.

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.

I want to limit the effects of the power of donors, no question about it.

I'm not a kicker and a screamer.

Maybe you're willing to tolerate a lot of bigotry from Donald Trump if you say, just change things, just change things.

A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.

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

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

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 think the twenty-first century happened, basically. That this century started on 9/11. And basically, it's been a century of counter reaction to globalization and the meritocracy. And a good century for 72 nations have gotten more authoritarian. We've had Brexit. We have Le Pen rising in France. We've just got a lot of these types all around the world. And the people who are suffering from globalization and the meritocracy are saying, "No more. You know, we get a voice too."

As for multimillionaires [in Donald Trump's Administration], a lot of us hope to be a multimillionaire some day. Again, spotty records, but it seems to be not without the range.