David Brooks Quotes

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.

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.

Two terrible behaviors don't make a good behavior.

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.

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.

People who don't like Trump really don't like Trump. And I guess I'm among them.

I do not believe that anything like what Donald Trump just proposed is going to get through Congress. Those deductions have a lot of defenders. The idea that they're going to completely explode the deficit is just a party killer for the Republican parties.

When you cover politics, you realize that knowing how to talk about character matters more and more. The way we hold ideas is more important than the ideas.

I don't think the Palestinians are in this position they're in, divided with Hamas and the P.A., unwilling to allow - or recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

I do think Donald Trump is a fundamentally unstabilizing force and that the people who swore to uphold the Constitution are going to have to take some measures at some point.

I wouldn't say philosophy and theology are dead. Brain science doesn't invent new philosophies but it helps remind us which of our existing philosophies are more true.

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

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

We live in a culture that encourages us to be big about ourselves, and I think the starting point of trying to build inner goodness is to be a little bit smaller about yourself.

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

I'm not sure [Donald] Trump has had that distinction between private and public life in his head. And so, I think there's likely to be an erosion of just that standard, that different standard, consciousness, and I think it's likely we'll see what we haven't seen in the last eight years and even the last 12 or 16 of private enrichment in office and scandals where people have to resign and things like that, because just once the standards go, behavior tends to go.

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

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

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.

The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the [Bush] haters themselves.

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

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.

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

Hillary Clinton continues to say Donald Trump's unacceptable, he doesn't have the character to be president. He is saying - continues saying she needs to be in prison.

Trump has picked the more extreme versions of all Republicans so far, the more aggressive. And I think the thing to watch out for is, I could totally paint a scenario where Trump runs an authoritarian regime. I can totally paint a scenario where he has no control over his own government.

I don't blame the Democrats for fighting. They have got a very energized base. And there is a lot to complain about a lot of these nominees. But I think, if you are actually going to turn someone down from a president's [Donald Trump] own Cabinet, it better be a lot more egregious than the cases we have seen.

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.

I generally think the president [Donald Trump] should get his Cabinet picks, unless they're egregiously out of the range, either ethically or intellectually out of the range of what's acceptable.

Parties that are majority parties are incoherent parties.

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.

America has an important role to play as the world leader in creating a global order, free trade, free waterways, free commerce, free movement of people. That happens because of U.S. military might.

For those of us who believe in it, there has to be a movement that says, "We still believe in trade. We still believe in international engagement for America. But for those losers or those who are suffering, we've got your back."

I think the Democrats are right to protest, but I don't think Jeff Sessions is so far out of the range of normalcy that he shouldn't be confirmed.

Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

Most people don't form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

You have got to be loyal to people beneath you.

Sometime over the past generation we became less likely to object to something because it is immoral and more likely to object to something because it is unhealthy or unsafe. So smoking is now a worse evil than six of the Ten Commandments, and the word sinful is most commonly associated with chocolate.

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

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

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.

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.

I would have swapped out Donald Trump's frontal cortex for somebody else's for a little more self-control.

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.

Trade has suddenly become massively unpopular. I think that's massively unjust. I think free trade has been wonderful for America on balance.

The fact that there could be an ISIS West Bank, the fact that the Palestinian government in Gaza doesn't even acknowledge Israel's right to exist, the fact of constant terror, delegitimization campaigns in the Palestinian schools, these are all much bigger facts. And for the Barack Obama administration to focus on this one fact, almost, not to the expense, but to diminish some of the others which are much more important, is to cast all the blame on Israel and to take the U.N. policy toward Israel, which has been longstanding, and sort of surrender to it.

Republicans are living in a hermetically sealed Republican universe, just as Democrats are. And so they're responding to their own universe, even if it leads to electoral downfall.

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.

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.